MANUFACTURING MODERNITY: THE 2008 BEIJING OLYMPIC OPENING CEREMONY

AND CHINA’S REBRANDING

Amber Hsin-i Levis

Presented to the

Committee on Degrees in History and Literature

and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

with Honors

Harvard College

Cambridge, Massachusetts

March 3, 2025

Word Count: 16,218

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION:

White

Ash

.....................................................................................................

CHAPTER

ONE:

‘Mathematical

Majesty’

.................................................................................

Beijing’s

Bid

..............................................................................................................................

Let

The

Games

Begin

..............................................................................................................

Martial

Arts

..............................................................................................................................

Empire

Production

.........................................................................................................

Made

China

..........................................................................................................................

‘We

don’t

have

control

over

our

people

that’

...................................................................

CHAPTER

TWO:

‘A

New

Era’

.................................................................................................

Zhang

Yimou’s

Second

Chance

...............................................................................................

‘Condemn

you

like’

...........................................................................................................

‘Benefit

the

Motherland’

..........................................................................................................

Confronting

Confucius

.............................................................................................................

One

World,

One

Dream

...........................................................................................................

Being

Harmonized

...................................................................................................................

CONCLUSION:

What

Does

China’s

Future

Hold?

.................................................................

BIBLIOGRAPHY

........................................................................................................................

INTRODUCTION: White Ash

Everyone seems to have something to say about the 2008 Olympics. Most people I talk to

still remember it. This summer, after the 2024 Paris Games, disgruntled viewers flocked to the

comments section of the YouTube video for the 2008 Opening Ceremony.

“I came back here to see what a REAL olympic opening ceremony looks like”

“The only country who respects the spirit of olympic games, thank you Chinese brothers

from Greece. Our countries have a long history, that's why we respect each other!”

“Leaving a comment to remind everyone that THIS IS WHAT THE REAL ceremony

should look like. No country ever beats Beijing 2008 yet!!”

I do not personally recall the 2008 Games in much detail, but I remember my parents

huddled around the dim, curved screen of our living room CRT television, enthusiastically

rooting for their home countries. I remember my mother’s delight — and my father’s

disappointment — when I picked a side and started chanting: “China! China! China!”

But the China we rooted for in 2008 was no longer the China that my mother had known.

Economic reforms under Chairman Deng Xiaoping had set the country on a rapid trajectory of

modernization.

China became noticeably more engaged

in global trade, attracting investors and

companies seeking to lower manufacturing costs. By 2008, it was known as the “world’s

factory.”

Just 32 years after his death, Mao Zedong’s China had receded and was replaced by a

new economic system that scholar Erin Huang refers to as “neoliberal post-socialism.”

anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert observes, the 2008 Games signaled a tectonic shift in the global

Erin Huang,

Urban Horror

Neoliberal Post-Socialism

and the Limits of Visibility

(Duke University Press,

2020), 2.

Kevin Honglin Zhang,

China as the World Factory

(Routledge,

2006), 1.

@kirole7381, @zarok1757, @jrenspace Comments on “Full Opening Ceremony from Beijing 2008,”

posted by “Olympics,” YouTube video, 4:18:00, August 8, 2019.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufV3EgyPGU&t=764s

financial order and played a crucial role in shaping modern Chinese identity.

For many Chinese

citizens, the Olympics heralded the long-awaited arrival of national prosperity.

Hubbert’s

interviews with Chinese youth illustrate how the Opening Ceremony served as a platform for

Chinese audiences to compare western

economic development models to China’s own.

Given

the high stakes,

the organizing committee tasked Zhang

Yimou, China’s most renowned living

director, with directing the Opening Ceremony. Zhang

had only a matter of hours to redefine

how the world perceived China.

He succeeded remarkably. The ceremony prompted western nationals to seriously

consider the emergence of a China that was a stronger, richer, and more powerful competitor

than they had imagined. In his review of the ceremony, film critic Robert Ebert confronted his

earlier impressions of China as “countless little people with chopsticks and pigtails. Yao Ming

wouldn’t have fit into my picture. China in those days had a pathetic economy… Today, from a

standing start, China has the world’s third-largest economy. We are first, but sinking. They’re

rising.”

Roger Ebert, “

Zhang Yimou’s gold medal

,”

Chicago

Sun-Times,

August 9, 2008.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/08/zhang_yimous_gold_medal.html

A note on Chinese names: in Chinese, the surname comes before the given name. All citations in the

bibliography will still follow the English convention with last name, first name. When someone’s name appears in

text, it will be written to follow the Chinese convention — the last name will always precede the first name.

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 1.

There are arguments for keeping the “w” in “western” lowercase, which I will do throughout this paper.

Here is the reasoning that a contributor to The Chicago Manual of Style online blog provides: “When making

reference to western (occidental) cultures, western media, western identity politics, I prefer to use a lowercase

de-emphasize the unity of the West (even though it is often convenient in argument to point to it as such) and

because capitalization of

would further privilege

the West.” Chicago Manual of Style Online, “Capitalization,”

last modified August 20, 2013,

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Capitalization/faq0034.html

;

however, I will continue

to refer to developed countries in western Europe and the United States as the “west,” despite the controversial,

contrived, and imprecise nature of the term because it serves as a helpful shorthand and also gestures to the

significant power that the west holds in the Chinese cultural imaginary, as well as the geopolitical dominance of

“western” actors.

Jennifer Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry: The 2008 Beijing Olympics,”

Modern China

39, no. 4

(2013): 421.

Academic and journalistic analyses often engage with the 2008 Opening Ceremony to the

extent that it affirmed the authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP):

Sinologist Florian

Schneider understands the ceremony as a performance of national solidarity that reinforced the

legitimacy of CCP rule, drawing comparisons to bloody Roman munera.

Similarly, Hong

Kong-based scholar Xu Guoqi likens the Opening Ceremony to the 1936 Berlin Olympics,

underscoring its function in projecting state power.

However, such comparisons overlook the

ceremony’s unique visual language. The layered references embedded in the ceremony’s

choreography were far more complex than many sinologists give credit for. My primary

methodology throughout this thesis is grounded in my readings of the ceremony’s symbolic

imagery, extrapolating from each key symbol the historical, cultural, and political context it

gestured to. While many academics are interested in using the ceremony to cast projections about

China’s future and determine the merit of the country’s path to it, I am neither interested in

speculating nor making value judgments.

Rather

, I will examine how the Opening Ceremony represented

China’s understanding of

itself. It functioned as a choreographed vision of the Chinese nation by planting China’s modern

economic strength within a manufactured historical narrative, couched in socialist aesthetics

familiar to its populace. By staging a mass spectacle adorned with cultural symbols drawn from

China’s early history, the ceremony positioned the CCP as both the inheritor of a millennia-old

civilization and the architect of China’s modern resurgence. The ceremony was a manifesto of

China’s national identity in the 21st century that expressed its complex negotiation between

neoliberal capitalism and state socialism. Beijing’s spectacle did not merely showcase national

Xu Guoqi,

Olympic Dreams: China and Sports: 1895–2008

(Harvard University Press, 2008), 227.

Florian Schneider,

Staging China: The Politics of

Mass Spectacle

(Leiden University Press, 2019), 20.

pride or authoritarian control; it actively redefined the Chinese nation as a unified whole. Past,

present, and future were seamlessly aligned with the state’s geopolitical aspirations.

If the ceremony provoked apprehension abroad, it may well signify China’s success in

asserting geopolitical dominance

. However, western

fixations on the ceremony’s perceived

militarism distracted from the ceremony’s capitalist messaging. This oversight is significant

because

it was not China’s military but China’s turn

toward (state-controlled) capitalism that laid

the foundations for its rise. The power of the spectacle, as Guy Debord first theorized

Society

of the Spectacle

, lies in its ability to naturalize

modern capitalist values.

Decades before

Debord, Frankfurt theorist Siegfried Kracauer examined how capitalist industrial production was

embedded in the visual aesthetics of mass coordination in his 1927 essay on modernity and

capitalism, “The Mass Ornament.”

As I will explain

in Chapter One, the Opening Ceremony’s

choreographed displays brought to life the aesthetics of mass ornamentation that Kracauer first

described a century ago. His framework interprets mass spectacles as representations of

economic power, demonstrating technological sophistication through the animation of large

groups of people. In this way, the Opening Ceremony symbolically showcased China’s proud

new role as a country of mass production. By also borrowing from the aesthetic of Maoist mass

spectacles, the ceremony rehearsed what Huang calls the illusory coexistence between socialism

and neoliberalism.

The ensconcing of neoliberal capitalism

within socialist aesthetics is central

to Beijing’s use of Kracauer’s mass ornament in the 2008 Opening Ceremony.

The glorification of industrial production, however, is not exclusive to capitalism. Since

he founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, Mao directed the country’s

Huang,

Urban Horror,

Siegfried Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1995), 77–79.

Guy Debord,

The Society of the Spectacle

, trans.

Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books, 1995), 36.

industrialization to “catch up” with the western nations that once exploited it.

As scholar

Geremie Barmé notes, the Opening Ceremony elided reference to Maoism, though it wove

China’s industrial development into other parts of China’s historical narrative by foregrounding

ancient technological achievements, which were thematically structured around the canonical

“four great inventions” of antiquity: gunpowder, papermaking, movable type, and the compass.

This framing situated China’s economic position in 2008 within a broader historical continuum,

rationalizing the CCP’s trajectory toward global superpower status.

If, as Kracauer argues, the mass ornament aestheticizes the mechanisms of its own

production, then the Beijing Opening Ceremony offered a spectacular illusion of unity — one

that, beneath its carefully choreographed surface, reflected the tensions and ambitions of China’s

21st-century transformation. Chapter Two will examine how the ceremony invoked an imagined

past, selectively drawing from Confucian values as well as ancient technologies to craft a

historical narrative that legitimizes China’s present while enhancing its soft power. Historians

Orville Schell and John Delury diagnose a recent shift in how Chinese politicians engage with

tradition: Although Mao’s government rejected Chinese traditional culture, the CCP now

assimilates it into state rhetoric in its pursuit of “wealth and power.”

Hubbert argues that the

Opening Ceremony leveraged invocations of tradition to set itself apart from the west, employing

“essentialized tropes of Chinese culture.”

However, these tropes align more with state rhetoric than with historical accuracy.

Political scientist Linus Hagström states that China’s soft power strategy relies not only on

cultural symbolism but on appeals to a state-sanctioned, simplified version of Confucianism —

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 427.

Orville Schell and John Delury,

Wealt h and Power:

China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century

, 5.

Geremie R. Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and

8 August 2008

,”

The China Quarterly

197 (2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741009000046

Odd Arne Westad and Jian Chen,

The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform

(Yale University Press, 2024): 186.

particularly the Confucian value of “harmony,” which was the central theme of the 2008 Opening

Ceremony.

As Schneider writes, “the conceptual frameworks

of Confucian thought provide

contemporaries with resources for their own political agendas,” and the CCP has utilized its

interpretation of Confucianism to defend its modern nationalist program.

John Delury further

contends that in the lead-up to the Games, “harmony” was weaponized in state policies targeting

Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Economist Andrew Martin Fischer

states that Tibetan protests against

ethnic erasure were exacerbated by widening economic disparities between Han developers and

Tibetans.

Pankaj Mishra confirms that “harmony” is

a watchword for subservience to the state

as it undertakes its project of rapid modernization, which victimized Han Chinese as well as

Tibetans.

The 2008 Opening Ceremony also opened a window into China’s projected trajectory,

capturing its aspirations at a pivotal historical moment. My conclusion will examine the

discourse surrounding China’s future and examine how both western discourse on China’s

growth and China’s own approach to modernization have been shaped by colonial frameworks.

Barmé, Schell, Delury, and Xu seem to suggest that China should aspire to emulate

western governments. However, it was China’s engagement with western economic models that

catalyzed its current conditions. To quote the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj

Žižek

, “Rather than

an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, China should be seen today as a repetition of the

development of capitalism in Europe… China developed quickly, not despite authoritarian

Pankaj Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity” in

China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance,

ed. Merkel-Hess, et al. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 41.

Andrew Martin Fischer,

The Disempowered Development

of Tibet in China: A Study in the Economics of

Marginalization

(Lexington Books, 2014), 11.

John Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

Policy Review

(Washington, D.C.)

, no. 148.

http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/magazines/harmonious-china/docview/216434587/se-2?accou

ntid=11311

Schneider,

Staging China,

178.

Linus Hagström, “Harmony and the Quest for Soft Power,”

International Studies Review

22 (2020), 508.

communist rule but because of it.”

China’s marketization and labor exploitation are responses

to the demands of western countries, which often determine the path to financial success in the

21st century. There is no shortage of criticisms to make about the Chinese government. However,

part of my project is to illustrate that critiques of China should not be directed by neo-Cold War

rhetoric. Instead, they should address the ways that many of the problems with Chinese

governance stem from its assimilation of the guiding principles that direct “liberal”

western

nations.

Paradoxically, this rhetoric may have reinforced the lasting impact of the 2008 Games.

More than 16 years later, memories of the Opening Ceremony still endure. These memories are

preserved in op-eds, academic literature, and even in unexpected, everyday encounters. As it

happens, I came to this topic by chance. During the summer of 2024, I went to the M+ Museum

in Hong Kong to see an exhibit by an artist who I thought I would like to write my thesis about.

A kind elderly docent had been following me around, giving me the spiel on the artworks he

liked. “Ah, Cao Fei,” he remarked when I arrived at my desired exhibit. “Did you know that she

made this after the 2008 Olympics?” He launched into a story about how he visited Beijing

around that time, about a year before the Games began. “Bulldozers were everywhere, and old

buildings were being razed and replaced with newer ones that were more modern and would be

more appealing to international visitors. I spent the whole day walking around the city, and by

I put “liberal” in quotations to acknowledge the multiple meanings of the word and the complicated

history of liberal humanism. In

The Robotic Imaginary:

The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor

, Jennifer

Rhee refers to the histories of dehumanized labor — including Chinese coolie labor — that gave rise to the

conception of liberal humanism in the west. In

The

Intimacies of Four Continents

, Lisa Lowe discusses

how it was

only through the exploitation of labor — particularly through colonialism and slavery — that the west could boast

an economy that supported liberal culture, as we define it. This is distinct from “liberal,” as defined by the Freedom

House and other civil rights organizations that rate “people’s access to political rights and civil liberties” and

individual freedoms. Jennifer Rhee,

The Robotic Imaginary

the Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor

(University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 4; Lisa Lowe,

Intimacies of the Four Continents

, (Duke University

Press,

2015), 2; Freedom House, “China: Country Profile”:

https://freedomhouse.org/country/china

Slavoj Žižek, “

Three Notes on China: Past and Present

,”

positions: east asia cultures critique

19, no. 3

(2011): 716.

the end of the day, my shoes were covered in white ash. Everything in the city was. It was all

white.” Then he smiled, thanked me for my time, and left.

CHAPTER ONE: ‘Mathematical Majesty’

Beijing’s Bid

On July 13, 2001, Beijing won the bid to host the Summer Olympics for 2008.

It would

be the first time China was to host the Games and a perfect opportunity for the country to show

the world how rapidly it had grown in the past few decades. In a survey taken that year, 79

percent of Chinese respondents and about 90 percent of Beijing residents said that the coming

Games were important to them personally.

According

China Daily

, a newspaper owned by

the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party, 31,000 parents named their children

Aoyun

(

奥运

the Mandarin translation for “Olympic

Games,” and

Shen’ao

(

申奥

the

translation for “bid for the Olympics,” between 2001 and 2008.

Preparations began in earnest over the next seven years. Xi Jinping, who was rapidly

rising through the ranks of the CCP, chaired a governing committee overseeing the arrangements

for the Games.

Olympics organizers invested heavily

in environmental clean-up efforts and

ordered the construction of 31 venues, railroads, and airports.

The Beijing Olympic committee

selected Zhang Yimou, one of China’s most acclaimed film directors, to be Chief Director of the

Olympic ceremonies.

Zhang had a budget of USD 300

million — far greater than the budget of

Zhang was the director of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, though for this paper, I will only be

referring to his Opening Ceremony.

Geoffrey A. Fowler and Stacy Meichtry, “China Counts the Cost of Hosting the Olympics,”

The Wall

Street Journal

, July 16, 2008; Xuefei Ren, “Airpocalypse

in Beijing and Delhi,” in

Governing the Urban in

China

and India

(Princeton University Press), 94.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121614671139755287https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121614671139755287

“China Forms Top-Level Leading Group for Olympics Preparations,”

Consulate General for the People’s

Republic of China in New York,

March 12, 2008.

http://newyork.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/xw/200803/t20080312_4686826.htm

“

China’s History is Spelled out in Baby Names

,”

China

Daily

, June 24, 2014.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/2014-06/24/content_17613691.htm

Tom Rosentiel, “

An Enthusiastic China Welcomes the

Olympics

,”

Pew Research Center

, August 5, 2008.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/08/05/an-enthusiastic-china-welcomes-the-olympics/

Jere Longman, “

Beijing Winds Bid for 2008 Olympic

Games

,”

The New York Times

, July 14, 2001.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/sports/olympics-beijing-wins-bid-for-2008-olympic-games.html

any film he had made — to make the grandest Opening Ceremony the world had ever seen.

After around 16,000 performers were selected, rehearsals began in 2007 in the southern suburbs

of Beijing.

“I believe on August 8th, you’ll perform

even better, surprising the world and

making the Chinese people proud,” Zhang told his troupe of thousands gathered for ceremony

rehearsals, sweat dripping from his temples as he stood on a stage overlooking the crowd.

These rehearsals were a secret well kept, conducted in a secure Olympics compound.

Beijing’s meticulous preparation paid off. In the years that followed, the Opening

Ceremony was remembered as a feat of unprecedented scale and coordination. It showcased a

new, modern China and is often referred to as the country’s “coming-out” ceremony, symbolizing

its emergence as a global superpower.

Guy Debord

claims that the spectacle visualizes the

value system of its producers; it “is a worldview that has actually been materialized.”

China’s

“coming out” was shaped by its embrace of global capitalism, which was celebrated by the 2008

Opening Ceremony. In the following chapter, I will explore how China’s capitalist turn entailed

its metamorphosis into the world’s factory, becoming a locus of cheap goods, materials, and

labor. The 2008 Opening Ceremony aestheticized this metamorphosis, grounding it in the

socialist aesthetic tradition of Maoist mass spectacles. As Erin Huang contends, this ideological

Debord,

The Society of the Spectacle,

Joe McDonald, “

President Xi Jinping, China’s ‘chairman

of everything,’

”

AP News

, February 3, 2022.

https://apnews.com/article/winter-olympics-china-president-xi-jinping-b5aeeed14e662e72570df15076290830

David Barboza, “

Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s

Close-Up,

”

The New York Times,

August 7, 2008.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/sports/olympics/08guru.html

Gu,

The Everlasting Flame

; BOCOG, “Preparation for

the Games”

Gu Jun (director),

The Everlasting Flame

, International

Olympic Committee, 2009. 1 hr., 40 min (18:00);

“

Preparation for the Games: New Beijing Great Olympics:

Official Report of the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games

(Volume III)

,” BOCOG Media & Communications

Department, May 2010.

https://stillmed.olympic.org/Documents/Reports/Official%20Past%20Games%20Reports/Summer/ENG/2008-RO-S

-Beijing-vol3.pdf

Osgood, “

What Everyone Got Wrong About the Last Beijing

Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

.”

hybridization has tangible effects: “The imaginary coexistence of socialism and capitalism

rehearses a futurity… that is actively reshaping the lived conditions of the present.”

The Opening Ceremony is often remembered by western scholars and journalists as a

symbolic illustration of China’s authoritarianism. Film critic Robert Ebert, for example,

compared the ceremony to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda film,

Triumph of the

Will

But such a reading misunderstands the kind

of power that the ceremony projected. As my

close reading will demonstrate, the 2008 Opening Ceremony was not a deliberate demonstration

of military authority, but rather a show of mastery over the new global economic system as the

“world’s manufacturing center.”

As Debord notes,

although spectacles can “[buttress] state

power,” the spectacle more often “characterizes bureaucratic capitalism.”

Zhang’s Opening

Ceremony affirms the principles of capitalist production through mass choreography, which

Siegfried Kracauer understands as an aestheticization of the machinelike routine of mass

production.

Of course, China’s economic transformation unfolded in a post-Fordist era, one far

removed from Kracauer’s own.

Still, viewing the Opening

Ceremony through his critique of the

“mass ornament” reveals how it reinforces both capitalist logic and state power within China’s

unique model of state-controlled capitalism.

Social scientists typically identify post-Fordist production by a reliance on information technology and

the global economy. However, the use of this term is still debated. See: Bob Jessop, “Fordism,”

Encyclopaedia

Britannica

, accessed March 2, 2025,

https://www.britannica.com/money/Fordism

Debord,

The Society of the Spectacle,

36.

James Fallows, “

China Makes, the World Takes

,”

The

Atlantic,

July 2007.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/07/china-makes-the-world-takes/305987/

Ebert, “

Zhang Yimou’s gold medal

.”

Huang,

Urban Horror,

Let The Games Begin

The Opening Ceremony kicked off at 8:08 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month of

2008.

This was deliberate: Eight is lucky in Chinese

numerology, and the Games were planned

to the second.

The video broadcast of the ceremony

captured the countdown for the Games,

signaled by a screen-projected animation of a Chinese sundial, invoking Beijing’s splashy

sundial-shaped monument that was constructed for its millennium celebrations eight years

earlier.

Meanwhile, a series of short-range fireworks circled the arena like shooting stars. On

the field, a low rumbling noise played as square lights started turning on in quick succession. The

camera moved in to show that these were not decorative lights, but rather 2,008 drums fitted with

LED strips. The rumbling noise, likened to “rolling spring thunder”

was, in fact, a drumroll.

Then, the lights went dark, and the drummers stood motionless, poised for their next fit of buzz

rolling. The crowd roared as the drums, each now a node of a giant timer, lit up to form numbers

counting down to the start of the Games. It was as if the event were a magical one, ordained by

the heavens and aligned with the firework-simulated stars. The audience watched in anticipation,

as though witnessing the fulfillment of cosmic fate.

U.S. Department of Defense, “

Multimedia gallery

.”

https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2001150071/

“

China: Monument to celebrate 5000 years of civilisation

.”

AP Archive

, video, 2:01.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1Fz7kWPbko

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “

Dreams and Nightmares

,” in

Dayan, Daniel, and Monroe Price.

Owning the

Olympics: Narratives of the New China

, 2008.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/book.6372

There was a competition among some parents to see who could give birth to a child at that exact time.

One expectant father

told

China Daily

“If my wife

is lucky enough to deliver an ‘Olympic baby,’ the luck means

something more than family joy.”Addie Chan, “Race to have an ‘Olympic baby,’”

China Daily

, October 12,

2007.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-10/12/content_6170207.htm

Figure 1: The countdown for the Games. Each node of light is one drum. “Full Opening

Ceremony from Beijing 2008,” posted by “Olympics,” YouTube video, 4:18:00, August 8, 2019.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufV3EgyPGU&t=1925s

Figure 2: The firework display for the Opening Ceremony, representing the invention of

gunpowder. Olympics.

Figure 3: Drum rehearsal.

Gu Jun (Director),

The Everlasting

Flame

, International Olympic

Committee, 2009. 1 hour 41 minutes.

https://olympics.com/en/original-series/episode/beijing-2008-official-film-the-everlasting-flame

Figure 4: The drumming routine. Olympics.

The Games were marketed as just this. Government officials framed the 2008 Olympics

as the fulfillment of a century-old wish — one that Geremie Barmé notes was “powerfully

attractive to both Chinese and international media outlets.”

In his book

Staging China: The

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

Politics of Mass Spectacle

, Florian Schneider writes that “Official slogans about China’s

‘hundred-year-old Olympic Dream’ resonated with many Chinese citizens, especially since such

phrases evoked images of an earlier China that had violently and disruptively modernised amidst

wars and foreign colonial interventions.”

This rhetoric

casts China’s modernization as an

ordained destiny — one that, at last, was unfolding without bloodshed. This destiny aligned with

the CCP’s grand historical narrative: Imperial China, once East Asia’s economic and cultural

center, was among the wealthiest kingdoms in the world. Government officials characterized

China’s rapid growth as a return to the natural order.

After enduring the so-called “Century of

Humiliation” at the hands of western colonial powers, war with Japan and the Kuomintang, and

decades of upheaval under Mao, China was finally a host for the Games, “an event that

epitomised modern internationalism,” Schneider writes.

And what a stage it was. The 2008

Games attracted the largest television audience in Olympic history, with 3.6 billion viewers —

about 53 percent of the world’s population — watching at least one minute of coverage.

After

the end of the countdown, Chairman Hu Jintao stood before his immense international crowd, the

first Chinese politician to have the privilege of initiating the Opening Ceremony. Beside him,

International Olympics Committee president Jacques Rogge watched stone-faced as Hu smiled

and waved.

IOC, “

Games of the XXIX Olympiad, Beijing 2008 Global

Television and Online Media Report

,”

September 2009.

https://stillmed.olympics.com/media/Document%20Library/OlympicOrg/Games/Summer-Games/Games-Beijing-20

08-Olympic-Games/IOC-Marketing-and-Broadcasting-Various-files/Global-Television-and-Online-Media-Report-B

eijing-2008.pdf

Schneider,

Staging China,

20.

This grand narrative is also a way the CCP legitimizes its one-party rule: “The CCP crafted a narrative

around the Century of Humiliation that legitimized its authority, portraying itself as the only party able to withstand

foreign intervention and alleviate the Chinese suffering caused by outside aggressors. According to this national

narrative, the CCP was the only government that could return China to its former glory and rectify the losses

experienced by China, justifying the one-party system.” Jordan Lac, “The Century of Humiliation and the Century

After,”

Brown Political Review,

January 26, 2024.

Schneider,

Staging China,

20.

The drummers began their act. They opened their arms to the sky, vocalizing in harmony.

They wore long silver robes accented with red, an auspicious color in Chinese tradition, their

foreheads marked with a red stripe. Their drums were modeled after the ancient bronze

fou

(

缶

)

drum. In perfect synchronization, they turned their heads and bent forward, striking the

drumhead with the palms of their hands. Then, they turned the other way, called out once more,

and struck the drum with the opposite hand. The rhythm pumped through the stadium like a

beating heart — not just from the drumming itself but from the synchronized movement and

breath that animated it. The drummers moved their bodies in synchrony with their breath. As

they bent down and leaned forward, they raised their eyes to the sky in supplication with

unwavering smiles. The drummers were more than musicians; they were the instruments. And

drumming was only part of their dance — they brushed their hands across their drums, caressing

them before miming the motions of swimming, their heads tilting as if coming up for air. As they

hit their drums with increasing force, the camera angle widened, revealing the full scale of the

performance.

Indeed, the most impressive part of this act is not the music nor the ability of any

individual drummer: it is the sheer number of people involved in the production. The drummers

chanted in unison, repeating the Confucian proverb, “Is it not a joy to meet friends who come

from afar?” before they drew glowing red drumsticks and swept them across the drums in a

cleaning motion. The lights went out. The drumsticks glowed like marching footprints. Suddenly,

29 footprint-shaped fireworks ignited in quick succession across the Beijing skyline, each one

marking an Olympiad, creating the trail of a giant invisible ghost. Only five minutes had passed

since the start of the countdown.

Figure 5: The ceremony’s firework footprints. Olympics.

Martial Arts

This impressive start set the tone for the remaining four hours of the ceremony, which

featured dozens more fireworks and thousands of performers. It was seductively maximalist in

both form and scale. Live NBC commentators deemed the performance “awe-inspiring and

perhaps a little intimidating.”

Many observers framed

the performance in militaristic terms.

The drummers, after all, were not professional performers but soldiers from the People’s

Liberation Army (PLA). For the ceremony, they swapped their fatigues for elaborate robes —

more futuristic monk than military recruit.

Sourcing

drummers from the PLA was likely a

pragmatic move: already disciplined in drill exercises, soldiers required less training and no

additional pay.

Yet, few spectators knew of or remarked on the PLA affiliation. Instead, perceptions of

militarism stemmed from broader skepticism of the Chinese state. In his book

Olympic Dreams,

published before the Games, Xu Guoqi warned: “The PRC, which has been obsessed with

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 410.

internationalizing its economy and international acceptance, must make sure its propaganda

machine will not overdo its spin. Will the Games strengthen the Chinese party-state as the Berlin

Games invigorated the Hitler government?”

Days after

the Opening Ceremony,

New Yorker

staff writer Anthony Lane asked: “What kind of society is it that can afford to make patterns out

of its people?”

He continued, “Nobody will ever surpass

the mathematical majesty of that night

in Beijing, and, in retrospect, that may be a good thing.”

Like Xu, Lane compared the Opening

Ceremony to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a commonly cited example of how spectacle can serve

authoritarian nationalism.

These interpretations may be shaped by western preconceptions of China — note Lane’s

reference to the drummers’ “mathematical” precision. In

The China Fantasy

, James Mann

warned of such tropes: “Before and during the Beijing Olympics of 2008, you will be bombarded

with stereotypes about China that have accumulated over hundreds of years.”

A double

standard is also at play. On the Olympic stage, displays of nationalism are usually excused, even

expected — not compared to the Third Reich. Notably, 2008 was the first year the Games were

hosted in an East Asian country without U.S. military bases, suggesting that perceptions of the

Opening Ceremony as “threatening” stemmed from a broader anxiety over the shifting global

order.

Critical reception was compounded by the historic

geopolitical tensions between China

and the west.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom refers to the negative

discourse of China as part of the

“American China Nightmare,” a cultural counterpoint to the “American China Dream,” both

Brownell, “The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point?”

Susan Brownell, “The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point? China’s First Olympics in East Asian

Perspective.”

Japan Focus

7, no. 23.

James Mann,

The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain

Away Chinese Repression

(Viking, 2007).

Lane, “

The Only Games in Town

.”

Anthony Lane, “

The Only Games in Town: Week One at

the Olympics

,”

The New Yorker,

August 15,

2008, 28.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/25/the-only-games-in-town

Xu,

Olympic Dreams,

227.

shaped by stereotypes that frame U.S. perceptions of China.

Vilifying China fuels American

nationalism, just as anti-western rhetoric has historically reinforced Chinese nationalism.

In this vein, Zhang’s creative team created a spectacle that functioned as a business

proposal that was meant to be inviting and assertive, not coercive or menacing. Although

Chinese symbols of militancy were invoked, they were also inverted. The most direct nod to

Chinese martial tradition came midway through the ceremony, when 2,008

Tai Chi masters

formed coordinated, geometric patterns thematically aligned with the dance of the drummers and

other preceding acts.

However, this display was not

widely seen as a threat. Instead, it drew on

Tai Chi’s connection to the elements and the harmony between body and environment. A child’s

drawing of a smiling sun over bright, crayon-colored mountains was raised above the Tai Chi

practitioners, while a burst of colorful birds was projected before them. Similarly, the drummers

at the ceremony’s opening were not typical military drummers. Their coordination of breath and

movement resembled martial arts choreography more than modern military drills. The

fou

drum

they beat was likely not a militaristic drum but a form of post-dinner entertainment for the

ancients. Scholars debate the

fou

’s original use,

with some suggesting it was used in rituals or

repurposed from wine vessels.

Other parts of the ceremony made direct references to military technology while similarly

subverting expectations, using martial aesthetics to create an alluring rather than threatening

display. The most striking example was the extensive use of fireworks to represent gunpowder,

one of the “four great inventions” of ancient China. The footstep-shaped fireworks represented

“Beijing's Olympic Venues to Be Used for Public Benefit.”

China Daily

, August 30, 2008.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-08/30/content_6983940.htm

;

Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix,

AZ.

“

Art performance of Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony

showcases Chinese culture

,”

Xinhua

, August

8, 2008.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080812013848/http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/08/content_9054650.htm

Wasserstrom, “

Dreams and Nightmares.

”

the heritage of the Games and inserted Beijing into the Olympic tradition as the 29th “step.”

Here, gunpowder, vis-à-vis its depiction in the firework display, became a symbol of unity and

continuity rather than destruction.

We may further access the symbolism of the ceremony by using Kracauer’s theory about

mass choreography and collective aesthetics. Like the Tiller Girl kickline Kracauer describes,

the Opening Ceremony presented a highly regimented yet non-militaristic display of geometric

human movement. “The meaning of the living star formations in the stadiums is not that of

military exercises,” writes Kracauer, insisting the formations “have no meaning beyond

themselves, and the masses above whom they rise are not a moral unit like a company of

soldiers.”

Mass spectacles like these are widely

accepted and digested. As Kracauer notes:

“These extravagant spectacles, which are staged by many sorts of people and not just girls and

stadium crowds, have long since become an established form.”

The audience, too, is part of the

mass spectacle: “The regularity of their patterns is cheered by the masses, themselves arranged

by the stands in tier upon ordered tier.”

Kracauer

likens such spectacles to the mechanized

coordination of the Fordist assembly line: “Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt,

performing a partial function without grasping the totality.”

The effect of such spectacles is the

aestheticization, romanticization, and normalization of capitalism, which requires the

disaggregation of the body into its parts before they are reincorporated into the apparatus of

industrial production.

Writing in the final years of the Weimar Republic,

Kracauer explored how mass culture

and spectacle shaped collective consciousness, particularly as mechanized labor and rationalized

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

79.

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

77.

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

77.

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

77.

The Tiller Girls were a popular dance troupe in the 1890s, the predecessors to the modern Rockettes.

production permeated everyday life. Fordist mass production restructured industrial work and

found expression in cultural forms — most notably synchronized dance performances, which

Kracauer saw as emblematic of the modern mass ornament. The aestheticization of Fordist

production, however, is not uniquely capitalist. Mass spectacles were a central tool in Mao’s

socialist aesthetics; he and senior CCP members regularly orchestrated political parades.

North

Korea, too, has perfected mass coordination with its annual Arirang Mass Games — originally

inspired by Stalinist mass displays — featuring elaborate card stunts and highly-choreographed

gymnastics performed by thousands.

Yet, as Barmé

notes, Zhang made a concerted effort to

avoid referencing Maoist-era parades and the Arirang Games, though “he would eventually

claim, perhaps with a measure of ironic pride, that only North Korea could have outdone his

display of co-ordinated mass movement.”

These parallels

in aestheticizing industrial production

do not imply ideological alignment but rather a shared valorization of modernization, an

aspiration common to both Marxist-Leninist and capitalist states.

On another level, borrowing

the visual language of socialist mass choreography allows the ceremony to endorse capitalist

production subtly, orchestrating the “imaginary coexistence of socialism and capitalism” that

Huang refers to.

This projected coexistence portrayed by the 2008 Opening Ceremony may have been

inspired by the first Games that Chinese athletes and politicians attended, the 1984 Los Angeles

“Based on Marx’s thesis that development of the forces of production is the key factor in social progress,

the main task of progressive forces is to create (or maintain) the conditions for fast ‘modernization,’ while avoiding

all forms of instability.” Žižek, “

Three Notes on

China: Past and Present

,” 719.

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

”; Ying Zhang and Chen Xia, “

Zhang Yimou jiemi

kaimushi

”(“

张艺谋揭秘开幕式

”),

translated as “Zhang Yimou

reveals the secrets of the Opening Ceremony,”

Nanfang zhoumo

(

南⽅周末

), “

Olympics special,” August

14, 2008, p. A6.

Lisa Burnett, “

Let Morning Shine over Pyongyang:

The Future-Oriented Nationalism of North Korea’s

Arirang

Mass Games

,”

Asian Music

44, no. 1 (2013):

https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/amu.2013.0010

; Jonathan

Watts,

“Welcome to the strangest show on earth

,”

The Guardian

October 1, 2005.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/01/northkorea

Hung Chang-Tai, “Mao’s Parades: State Spectacles in China in the 1950s.”

The China Quarterly

, 2007,

411.

Olympics.

As journalist Miles Osgood notes, the LA Games were “one of the most garishly

designed and overtly corporate Olympics ever.”

Serving

as a cultural front in the Cold War

between the U.S. and the USSR, the 1984 Olympics became one of the most profitable in history,

yielding a $233 million profit from a modest budget through brand sponsorships and advertising

that produced revenue as well as projected capitalist aesthetics.

Anthropologist Susan Brownell

writes that the LA Olympics inspired a greater embrace of consumerist aesthetics in China’s

1987 National Games, a precursor to what would come in 2008.

Though the 2008 Beijing

Games did not adopt the same overtly capitalist style as the LA Games, they were far more

extravagant, generating only $3.6 billion in revenue against $40 billion in costs.

The 2008 Beijing Opening Ceremony thus presents a paradox: it projects a mass

spectacle rooted in socialist aesthetics to highlight China’s market-driven modernization. While

borrowing some visual language from socialist mass performances, it avoids direct references to

Mao, constructing an image of China that reconciles ideological contradictions. At the same

time, the ceremony ensures continuity with its communist origins, as evidenced by the absence

of branding and corporate advertising, while affirming China’s integration into a globalized

capitalist economy. The Games do not merely represent China’s economic rise but actively

aestheticize it, transforming industrial production, mass coordination, and national ambition into

a seamless, consumable image for both domestic and international audiences.

James McBride, Noah Berman, and Melissa Manno, “

The

Economics of Hosting the Olympic Games

”

The Council of Foreign Relations

. July 20, 2024.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-games

Susan Brownell,

Training the body for China: Sports

in the moral order of the people’s Republic

(University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Les Carpenter, “

The miracle of 1984: How Los Angeles

saved the dying Olympics

,”

The Washington

Post

, July 21, 2024.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/07/21/1984-olympics-los-angeles-us-summer-games/

Osgood, “

What Everyone Got Wrong About the Last Beijing

Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

.”

Miles Osgood. “

What Everyone Got Wrong About the Last Beijing Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

.”

Slate

. February 3, 2022.

https://slate.com/culture/2022/02/2008-beijing-olympics-opening-ceremony-zhang-yimou-meaning.html

An Empire of Production

The economic transformation that the ceremony captured began just 30 years before the

Games.

In 1978, two years after Mao’s death, Deng

Xiaoping became China’s new chairman.

Under Deng, the CCP embarked on a transition from Maoism to a market-driven economic

system, which he referred to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

This era of “Opening

Up and Reform” entailed relaxed economic restrictions and the creation of Special Economic

Zones (SEZs) — areas of free trade designed to attract foreign businesses.

The impact of these

reforms cannot be overstated: the percentage of impoverished villagers dropped from 40.65

percent before 1978 to 4.75 percent in 2001.

China also became increasingly integrated into international trade.

Collaboration

between American and Chinese business interests led to China’s rebranding as an “empire of

production,” just as America was becoming an “empire of consumption.”

The CCP

intentionally devalued the RMB to lower Chinese prices in the global market, boosting its

competitiveness.

The competitive prices of Chinese

goods and labor are often cited as one of

the key drivers of China’s post-Mao rapid economic growth — under President Jiang Zemin and

Katarzyna Twarowska, “Reforms of China’s Exchange Rate Regime and the Renminbi

Internationalization,”

Ekonomia Prawo

18, no. 4 (2019):

531–556.

Maier,

Among Empires

; Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson,

Made in China: When US-China Interests

Converged to Transform Global Trade

(Yale University

Press, 2010), 266. See also: Judith Stein,

Pivotal

Decade:

How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s

(Harvard University Press, 2024), 23–50.

Charles S. Maier,

Among Empires: American Ascendancy

and Its Predecessors

(Harvard University

Press, 2006), 191–284.

Loren Brandt, and Thomas G. Rawski,

China’s Great

Economic Transformation

, (Cambridge University

Press, 2008), 3. However, there is room for debate on this common state-centric narrative. Odd Arne Westad and

Jian Chen contend in their 2024 book

The Great Transformation

that China’s economic miracle was a bottom-up

transformation, and that “the revolution from below did more to change China than any orders issued by the CCP.”

Westad and Chen,

The Great Transformation,

306.

Justin Yifu Lin, Cai Fang, and Li Zhou,

The China

Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic

Reform

(The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press,

2003), 193.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fj84hd

Deng Xiaoping, “

Building Socialism with a Specifically

Chinese Character

,”

People's Daily

, October 1,

1984.

http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-4/deng-xiaoping-socialism-with-chinese-characteristics

There are valid claims that China has always leaned capitalist, even under Mao. See: Jacob Eyferth,

“Consumption, Consumerism, Capitalism,”

PRC History

Review 5,

no. 1 (October 2020): 1–26.

Premier Zhu Rongji, China emerged as the “factory of the world.”

Just five months after

Beijing won the bid to host the Games, China joined the World Trade Organization.

By 2008,

“Made in China” labels adorned countless consumer goods, from the shirts tourists wore to the

Games to the televisions that streamed the Opening Ceremony — even if, as was often the case,

parts of these goods were made in other countries.

China’s national rebranding as an essential

participant in the global economy was reinforced by the branding of these “Made in China”

labels.

However, maintaining competitive prices comes at the expense of the livelihoods of the

Chinese laborers who produce cheap goods for export, a status quo upheld by the government

through strict anti-union and anti-labor activism policies.

Anthropologist David Harvey

describes China’s new economic policy, with its “reconstitution of class power,” as

state-controlled neoliberalism rather than “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the CCP

insists.

In the post-Mao period, ideological commitment

took a backseat to national prosperity,

a sentiment famously encapsulated by Deng’s justification for reform: “crossing the river by

David Harvey,

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

(Oxford

University Press, 2005), 120-151; Harvey’s

definition of neoliberalism is as follows: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic

practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial

freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets,

and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such

practices.” Harvey,

A Brief History of Neoliberalism,

Tim Pringle,

Trade Unions in China: The Challenge

of Labour Unrest

(Routledge, 2011).

Ingleson, 266; David Barboza, “‘

Made in China Labels’

Don’t Tell the Whole Story

,”

The New York

Times

, February 6, 2006.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/business/worldbusiness/made-in-china-labels-dont-tell-whole-story.html

;

Jenny Chan and Ngai Pun, “

Suicide as Protest for the

New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: Foxconn,

Global Capital, and the State

,”

The Asia-Pacific Journal:

Japan Focus

, September 13, 2010.

https://apjjf.org/jenny-chan/3408/article

Weysyee Goh and Wee-Yeap Lau, “Impact of Structural Change on China’s Exports Post-WTO

Accession.”

Contemporary Chinese Political Economy

and Strategic Relations

6, no. 2: 741.

Twarowska, “Reforms of China’s Exchange Rate Regime and the Renminbi Internationalization”; Schell

and Delury,

Wealt h and Power

, 328.

feeling the stones.”

China’s post-reform economic success has much to do with the global rise

in neoliberalism in advanced capitalist economies.

It is important to recognize that China’s suppression of labor rights was integral to its

assimilation into the global economic system, gaining a foothold by setting prices below the fair

cost of labor. China’s reputation as the world’s factory came at the expense of Chinese wage

laborers, benefiting foreign (typically western) companies and consumers.

We can understand

the experiences of Chinese assembly line workers within Kracauer’s framework. Zhang Lijia, a

former worker at a missile factory in Liming, wrote in her memoir that the rush home resembled

a “surging tide” of factory workers, “each bobbing black head another faceless part of the

Liming factory machine.”

A separate account comes from Li Hai, a 19-year-old migrant worker

at Foxconn, a Shenzhen-based manufacturing company for electronics, who jumped to his death

during a wave of suicide attempts at the two main production facilities in 2010.

In his suicide

note, he wrote that he found “fitting into the robotic assembling process, at high speed and to a

precision measured down to the second, most difficult.”

Outside observers echo this

mechanical precision demanded of Chinese factory workers. A writer for

Audio Technology

who

visited a Shenzhen International Audio Group factory wrote: “This was a ‘by hand’

mass-production line where everyone’s job was carefully supervised, where quality control had

Chan and Pun, “Suicide as Protest.”

Zhang Lijia,

“Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker's Memoir

of the New China

, (Atlas, 2008), 49.

Chan and Pun, “Suicide as Protest.”

Keo, “Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones.”

Bernard Z. Keo, “

Crossing the River by Feeling the

Stones: Deng Xiaoping in the Making of Modern

China

,” Association for Asian Studies, May 24, 2023.

https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/crossing-the-river-by-feeling-the-stones-deng-xiaoping-in-th

e-making-of-modern-china/

been adopted with a systematic mastery and sophistication that I had arrogantly assumed only

existed in places like Germany and Switzerland.”

While China’s reforms came in the post-Fordist age, they mirror a similar mechanization

of human labor that Kracauer described over half a century earlier, with employees on the

assembly line performing a “partial function without grasping the totality.”

Crucially, this

conveyor belt operates based on scientific principles that ostensibly optimize efficiency and

productivity. Organization is key: “The organization stands above the masses, a monstrous figure

whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bearers.”

Li Hai’s characterization of the

“robotic” process reflects Kracauer’s claims that the assembly line workers “do not become

masters of the machine but instead become machine-like,” and that they are “henchmen of the

technological excesses.”

The similarities between these accounts and those of Amazon workers in America are

striking.

My point here is neither to localize the

problems of global capitalism nor to pity its

victims, but to demonstrate how recurring themes of industrial production transcend borders and

how global audiences have internalized the “aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the

prevailing economic system aspires,” as Kracauer writes.

It is this “aesthetic reflex” that

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

79.

“Here is an uncomfortable truth I’m waiting for some Chinese official to point out: The woman from the

hinterland working in Shenzhen is arguably better off economically than an American in Chicago living on

minimum wage. She can save most of what she makes and feel she is on the way up; the American can’t and

doesn’t. Over the next two years, the minimum wage in the United States is expected to rise to $7.25 an hour.

Assuming a 40-hour week, that’s just under $1,200 per month, or about 10 times the Chinese factory wage. But

that’s before payroll deductions and the cost of food and housing, which are free or subsidized in China’s factory

towns.” James Fallows, “China Makes, the World Takes.” See also: Mandy McClure and Victoria Godinez “

Department of Labor finds Amazon exposed workers to unsafe conditions, ergonomic hazards at three more

warehouses in Colorado, Idaho, New York,

”

US Department

of Labor

, February 1, 2023.

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20230201-0

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

70.

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

79.

Kracauer,

The Mass Ornament,

79.

Andy Stewart, “

Made in China

,”

Audio Technology

36.

https://www.audiotechnology.com/PDF/FEATURES/AT36_IAG_factory_MadeInChina.pdf

Beijing’s Opening Ceremony catered to in gestures towards the “prevailing economic system”

that both western audiences and Chinese performers shared, even if their functions within that

system differed. The relationship between the ceremony’s audience and performers mirrored the

relationship between China and the west within said economic system: that of the consumer and

the producer, respectively.

Made in China

At times, China is privileged by its position as “factory of the world.” China largely

avoided the devastation wrought by the global financial crisis, which began to unravel in late

2007 and ultimately imploded a month after the end of the Games with the bankruptcy of

Lehman Brothers in mid-September of 2008.

100

Of course,

China did not entirely escape the

crisis — its heavy reliance on the export sector resulted in the closure of tens of thousands of

factories.

101

Still, China’s financial sector remained

mostly intact because it had large foreign

reserves and did not deal with as many derivatives as western markets.

102

China also mitigated

damage with a stimulus package, part of which was directed to repair damage from the 2008

Wenchuan Earthquake, alongside aggressive fiscal and loose monetary policy.

103

Jennifer Hubbert argues that the 2008 Games marked a turning point in the global

financial order, observing that many countries now “bypass western-dominated institutions such

as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and turn to China to bolster their

development.” Hubbert views this shift as a sign of a “changing power field” and suggests it

signals “a future of greatness for China rather than ‘modernity — not quite.’”

104

The Opening

104

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 421.

103

Yu eh , “

A Stronger China

.”

102

Yu eh , “

A Stronger China

.”

101

Chan and Pun, “Suicide as Protest.”

100

Linda Yueh, “

A Stronger China

.”

International Monetary

Fund

47, no. 2 (June 2010).

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2010/06/yueh.htm

Ceremony services this image of China’s singular, and decidedly non-western, greatness. Again,

the ceremony was void of corporate branding; while the committee received branding

sponsorships, all partnerships and advertisements were displayed off-site.

105

The spectacle produced by the Opening Ceremony was itself a product consumed by

billions. As Guy Debord notes, “The time spent consuming images… is both the particular

terrain where the spectacle’s mechanisms are most fully implemented and the general goal that

those mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all particular consumptions.”

106

Ironically,

China’s depiction of industrial production was also a good to be consumed that was “Made in

China.” Moreover, the ceremony’s special focus on China’s technological advancements —

rather than its cultural developments, such as art and philosophy — is significant. By centering

China’s “four great inventions,” the ceremony underscored how tools made in China have long

influenced western historical progress.

The portrayal of these inventions through dance emphasizes the role of physical labor in

their creation. The act representing “papermaking” did not center paper as a material. Rather, the

ceremony used the paper as a stage, stressing its role as a medium for human creation. A giant

scroll of canvas was suspended from above as an ensemble of black-costumed dancers created an

ink wash

shan shui

(

⼭⽔

)

with brushes hidden in their

sleeves. They rolled and slid across the

canvas, mimicking the strokes of an inked paintbrush. The painting itself is nothing remarkable,

more a child’s attempt at a landscape than a traditional

shan shui

painting. The dance, instead, is

the product, and the art lies in the use of the body as the tool of production. Such capitalization

of human labor is both the result and romanticized aesthetic under Kracauer’s principles.

106

Debord,

The Society of the Spectacle,

83.

105

BOCOG, “

Preparation for the Games

.”

Figure 6: The papermaking act. Each dancer is an ink brush. Olympics.

Figure 7: The movable type act. Each performer is a block of type. Olympics.

The ceremony’s portrayal of movable type follows these same principles. The typeset

was scaled up to awe-inspiring proportions; the blocks of type moved in precise, rhythmic

waves, rippling like water. The typeset functioned as a pinscreen, forming different renditions of

(

和

the Chinese character for “harmony.” At the

end of the number, the blocks opened,

revealing that the typeset was not operated pneumatically but by 897 performers in boxes. It was

a purposeful, gleeful reveal of the Mechanical Turk.

107

The “compass” act presented the most explicit reference to China’s wealth. The invention

of the compass was visualized through the exploits of Ming Chinese admiral Zheng He, who led

the Yongle Emperor’s vast maritime fleet.

108

Zheng He’s

famed voyages are remembered for

promoting Chinese soft power, showcasing the kingdom’s wealth of resources and goods to

expand its tributary system.

109

His junks were laden

with deposits of gold, silver, porcelain, and

silk, which were traded for novelties from abroad.

110

Like the preceding acts, the compass

performance employed synchronized movement as its primary visual. Hundreds of dancers

wielding giant oars moved in unison to simulate the motion of massive ships at sea, their bodies

standing in for the vessels. The massive scale of coordination of the dancers’ oars evoked the

grandeur of Zheng He’s junks, supposedly once the largest ships in the world. References to

ancient and imperial China telegraph the CCP’s hopes for a renewed age of prosperity and

growth — one that reimagined the Middle Kingdom at the center of the world once again, as the

compass rose.

‘

We don’t have control over our people like that’

As the world’s second-most populous nation, China’s prosperity is fueled by its enormous

population, which provides an unparalleled reservoir of labor. The ceremony’s depiction of

manufacturing hinged on portraying people as instruments of production: the drummers were the

110

Cartwright, “The Seven Voyages of Zheng He.”

109

Cartwright, “The Seven Voyages of Zheng He.”

108

Mark Cartwright, “The Seven Voyages of Zheng He.”

Worl d History Encyclopedia

, February 7, 2019.

107

This was a popular hoax in the late 19th century that involved an intelligent automaton (the “Turk”) that

could play chess. It was later revealed to be controlled by an expert chess player inside the machine. See:

“Enlightened Automata,” ed. Clark et al.,

The Sciences

in Enlightened Europe

(The University of Chicago

Press,

1999) 126–165.

drumsticks, the dancers were the brushes, and the performers were the type blocks and oars of

imperial junks. “How did they do it?” NBC commentator Bob Costas asked, “they did it with

people.

”

111

Beijing’s mass orchestration of performers

is what led some western viewers to

conclude that, more than a celebration, the ceremony was an assertion of China’s strict

authoritarian control.

In an episode of the American show

30 Rock

, Wesley tells Liz Lemon, “I

can’t suffer through the London Olympics. We’re not prepared, Liz! Did you see the Beijing

Opening Ceremonies? We don’t have control over our people like that.”

112

Although such interpretations missed the ceremony’s capitalist messaging, they correctly

recognized the ceremony’s proud demonstration of China’s capacity to mobilize and manage its

large population. Moreover, the ceremony’s synchronized aesthetics also projected an image of

national unity. This messaging is rooted in its references to socialism; the CCP holds that

national unity relies on the preservation of its one-party system. As Slavoj Žižek notes, China

derides movements for workers’ rights and multiparty democracy as threats to the stability China

has enjoyed since the establishment of its current government in 1949.

113

He writes: “The

conclusion is clear: in China, only Communist Party leadership can sustain rapid modernization

under conditions of social stability; the official (Confucian) term is that China should become a

‘harmonious society.’”

114

The next chapter will delve

into the stakes of China’s professed

commitment to such a society. In such critiques, we cannot forget that the west is entangled in

the cruelties of China’s state-controlled modernization. China’s low wages are a response to

western demand; Apple, Foxconn’s biggest client, increases its profit margin by sourcing its parts

114

Žižek, “

Three Notes on China: Past and Present

,”

719.

113

Žižek, “

Three Notes on China: Past and Present

,”

719.

112

Tina Fey (show creator),

30 Rock.

Season 4, episode

21, “

Emmanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land

,” aired

May 13 2010, in broadcast syndication,

NBC

111

Osgood, “

What Everyone Got Wrong About the Last Beijing

Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

.”

as cheaply as possible. This raises the question: Who truly stands to benefit from China’s

modernization?

CHAPTER TWO: ‘A New Era’

Zhang Yimou’s Second Chance

Before Zhang Yimou won the bid to be the lead director of the 2008 Opening

Ceremony,

115

he had a mixed reputation within his home

country. In 1994, when Zhang released

his seminal work

To Live

, a film about a family struggling

to survive as the Communists came to

power, he was sanctioned by the government and forbidden to receive foreign funding for his

films for five years.

116

Chinese authorities also prevented

him from attending the Cannes Film

Festival, where

To Live

won multiple awards and was

a contender for Best Feature Film.

117

This

was the second time one of Zhang’s films was nominated for the Palme d’Or; four years earlier,

his film

Ju Dou

, a film about a woman sold to an abusive

business owner, had also received a

nomination

118

However, as Zhang rose to prominence

in the west, his films were regularly

censored and censured within China. Many citizens derided Zhang for reinforcing prejudiced

understandings of China and its people as culturally and morally backward.

119

Jennifer Hubbert

records an exchange she had in 2008 with one of her students in Kunming who claimed that

Zhang “exaggerates [China’s problems] on purpose… He exoticizes the problem and then it

seems that this is all there is of China. Foreign audiences are looking for this. It’s what they

expect.”

120

Many of Hubbert’s interviewees echo this

sentiment, believing that Zhang’s Opening

120

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 419.

119

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 419.

118

“Official Selection 1990: All the Selection,” Festival de Cannes, 1990,

https://web.archive.org/web/20131214195202/http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/archives/1990/allSelections.html.

117

David Barboza, “Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up.”

116

Osgood, “

What Everyone Got Wrong About the Last Beijing

Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

.”

115

While the exact role of Zhang’s co-directors is not well-defined in public documents, and it is certain

that Zhang received a lot of help from them, I will be heretofore attributing all of the creative decisions to Zhang

since he was head director and, therefore, was ultimately responsible for every creative decision that was or was not

made, even if he himself did not come up with all of them.

Ceremony was a chance for him to redeem himself and the country he had profited from

pillorying.

Through carefully choreographed performances and historical symbolism, the 2008

Opening Ceremony depicted a China that was powerful and unified, rooted in a bastardized

definition of the Confucian ideal of “harmony.” In Confucius’s view, harmony did not entail

conformity: in

The Analects

, he proclaims “

Junzi he

er butong”

(“

君⼦和⽽不同

”),

which

loosely translates to “a gentleman”

121

is harmonious while maintaining difference.” However, in

the Opening Ceremony, “harmony” was portrayed through uniformity, emphasizing collective

order over individual distinction. The ceremony’s interpretation of Confucianism exemplified

China’s use of the ideology as a cultural and ideological tool to reinforce social cohesion and

national identity.

122

Yet, the state’s vision of harmony stood in stark contrast to the political realities of 2008.

Just months before the Olympics, a major Tibetan uprising challenged the very narrative of unity

that the ceremony sought to affirm. Protests erupted across Tibet and were met with a swift and

forceful state crackdown. Internationally, the uprising intensified scrutiny of China’s human

rights record; domestically, the uprising reinforced the government’s commitment to controlling

China’s national image.

‘Condemn it if you like’

Far from a grassroots renegade, Zhang matured as an artist within state cultural

institutions. At 20, he worked as a cadre in Daxing County’s Mao Thought Propaganda Station

122

Schneider,

Staging China,

182.

121

What I translate as gentleman here could also be translated as “noble man” for to be a gentleman, in

Confucius’s eyes, was to be the ideal man. This was the model he believed all should aspire to.

for five years.

123

He rose through the ranks of state-sponsored film and cultural organizations

before becoming Party Secretary of the Beijing Cultural Bureau.

124

The same year he directed the

Opening Ceremony, Zhang became head of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre and joined the

country’s top political advisory body.

125

Indeed, there

has always been a cozy relationship

between China and its controversial new wave directors, the so-called “Fifth Generation” to

which Zhang belongs. During the peak of the new wave movement, Chen Kaige, one of the most

prominent members of the Fifth Generation, was approached by PLA commanders who wanted

to increase the reach of their propaganda films. Zhang worked as a cinematographer for Chen’s

resulting 1986 film

The Big Parade

126

This collaboration

epitomized the intricate nexus between

avant-garde cinema and military public relations in China, demonstrating how state power and

artistic innovation converge to shape national narratives.

Zhang’s movies from the 1990s are the products of a brief period of artistic exploration

into the complex social issues he observed growing up.

To Live

may have been partially inspired

by Zhang’s difficult childhood (his family was a target of the Cultural Revolution due to his

father’s affiliation with the Kuomintang during the Chinese Civil War

127

). In any case,

To Live

“was the last time he seriously challenged government censors,” Zhang’s production manager

told

The New York Times

128

From the 2000s onwards,

Zhang’s films became decidedly less

critical of the government. Leading up to the Olympics, Zhang departed drastically from the style

he established with his revolutionary China-era films and directed three big-budget martial arts

films that broke Chinese box office records. In 2007, he defended his new “international and

128

Barboza, “Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up.”

127

Amy Tikkanen, “

Zhang Yimou

,”

Encyclopædia Britannica

May 19, 2010, last updated December 7,

2024.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zhang-Yimou

126

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

125

Barboza, “Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up”; Barmé.

124

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

123

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

modern” taste, telling

The

New York Times

that “China has stepped into a new era, an era of

consumption and entertainment,” adding, “you can condemn it if you like, but it is a trend of

globalization.”

129

In return for Zhang’s artistic contributions,

Beijing promoted his work, granting

prime opening dates, supporting his Oscar bids, and hand-picking him to direct the Olympic

ceremonies.

130

Regardless of if Zhang was fully trusted to lead the ceremonies, he did not have the

chance to go rogue: His co-directors were all card-carrying members of the PLA, with a deputy

minister of propaganda overseeing the first half of the Opening Ceremony.

131

This raises the

question: Why did the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee bother with Zhang at all? Susan

Brownell sees the move to choose Zhang as director of the Olympic ceremonies as one that

“prioritize[d] international tastes over domestic.”

132

Zhang’s banned movies are some of China’s

most popular cinematic exports, and the preparations for the Olympics were primarily concerned

with impressing western audiences. Writer Zhang Lijia quotes a 67-year-old Olympic volunteer

who rejected the stereotypes historically projected onto China: “I want foreigners to see what

China has achieved. We were called the ‘sick man of Asia.’ Now we are strong and rich enough

to hold such a major international event.”

133

The term

“sick man of Asia” historically denoted

China’s perceived weakness — a legacy that contemporary state narratives as well as Chinese

citizens have long sought to overcome. This desire shaped the Opening Ceremony’s presentation

of China.

Zhang was candid about his objective to rehabilitate China’s image through the

ceremonies. He claims to have no interest in politics but in “do[ing] something for the Chinese

133

Zhang Lijia, “Hand Grenades and the Olympics,” in

China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance

, ed.

Merkel-Hess, et al., 168.

132

Brownell, “The Beijing Olympics as a Turning Point?”

131

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

130

Barboza, “

Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up

.”

129

Barboza, “Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up.”

people.”

134

Reflecting on his work in 2008, Zhang told

Xinhua

that he was far more proud of his

direction over the ceremonies than any of his movies:

From the very beginning, you know that behind you is the country and all the Chinese

people, which is a heavy responsibility. You are not solely representing yourself, so

success is not personal success. I don’t know how many people’s blood, sweat, and tears

were required to achieve the brilliant bloom that night, which makes it all the more

meaningful.

135

He explained that the directorial team was motivated by the slogan displayed in their

headquarters: “

zuguode liyi gaoyu yiqie,

” (“

祖国利益⾼于

⼀切

”),

or “benefit the motherland

above all.”

136

‘Benefit the Motherland’

Zhang’s assignment was to tell a “good China story,” to put it in the words of Xi Jinping

at the 2013 National Conference on Thought and Propaganda.

137

The spectacle crafted by the

ceremony directors aimed to overcome crippling Orientalist stereotypes depicting opium

sickness, impoverished rural traditionalism, and “countless little people with chopsticks and

pigtails” through the volume of its drum rolls and the “brilliant bloom” of its fireworks. But the

ceremony embraced and reworked other Orientalist stereotypes. The ceremony’s mass spectacle

embodied Ebert’s trope of “countless little people” and reinforced the “mathematical” technical

137

“[We] must meticulously and properly conduct external propaganda, innovating external propaganda

methods, working hard to create new concepts, new categories and new expressions that integrate the Chinese and

the foreign, telling good China stories, communicating China’s voice well.” Xi Jinping, National Conference on

Thought and Propaganda, 2013, translated by the

Chinese

Media Project

; “telling good China stories,” originally

“

Jiang hao zhongguo gushi

” (“

讲好中国故事

”)

is also translated

as “telling China’s stories well,” though scholar

David Wang makes a case for understanding his meaning as “good China stories” in his book

Why Fiction Matters

in Contemporary China

136

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

.”

135

“

Beijing Opening Ceremony will be Historic, says

Chief Director Zhang Yimou

,”

Xinhua Net

, January

7, 2022.

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/20220107/d968df5ffefd434c80d171abe6a2a430/c.html

; I’ve tailored

the translation to better fit English grammar.

134

Barboza, “Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up.”

prowess often attributed to Asian people. Ultimately, the goal of the ceremony was not to

challenge western stereotypes of China but to “benefit the Motherland.”

Even portrayals of China’s weakness can serve the state by rallying support to defend its

national image. The CCP actively reminds the public of China’s erstwhile “sick man” status,

memorializing the first day of Japanese occupation as “National Humiliation Day”

138

and, as

Schell and Delury note, “children are still exhorted to ‘never forget national humiliation and

strengthen our national defense.’”

139

Since Chairman

Jiang Zemin’s tenure, Chinese media has

“further entrench[ed] a popular impression of China as predominantly [a] victim and colonial

subject.”

140

The CCP is effectively granted a blank

check — any means for China’s economic

“recovery” are appropriate when one believes that the country is “behind” the west in industrial

development due to its past impoverishment at the hands of foreign empires and enterprises.

Under this logic, even rapid, disruptive industrialization and urbanization become legitimized.

When framed within a narrative of victimhood, the Opening Ceremony becomes a project

of redemption, and Zhang Yimou a national hero. Zhang must have understood this when he

admitted that he felt “the country and all the Chinese people” were behind him. He was the

architect of a digestible culture and grand narrative that bolstered the CCP’s modernization

policies. The ceremony’s central theme of “harmony” refers to both the directives of Chairman

Hu Jintao to build a “Harmonious Socialist Society” as well as the Confucian virtue. By invoking

Confucius, the CCP enshrined party loyalty in the revered words of China’s greatest sage,

molding its historical narrative to affirm national identity and legitimize modern aspirations.

140

Barmé, “

China’s Flat Earth: History and 8 August

2008

”; Jiang Zemin’s term as president ended in

2003.

139

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

138

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

Hubbert’s students were excited about the cultural learning that would take place at the

Olympics, hopeful that the event would give westerners a chance to better understand Chinese

culture. As one student noted, “China is different from other places. It has a very long history; it

definitely has the longest history of all the Olympic cities. When people get to Beijing, they will

see a mix of the modern and the traditional; this is China.” A different student shared this

enthusiasm, saying their “favorite parts of the Opening Ceremony were those that reflected

traditional Chinese culture, particularly the Confucian

Analects

section.” For this student, the

ceremony’s depiction of “China’s 5,000-year history … wasn’t about displaying how strong

China is but showing the world that China’s culture and history are worth learning.”

141

Another

student mentioned that he would have enjoyed Zhang’s films more if they had shown “deeper

ideas about Confucianism and Daoism.”

142

It was almost as though the filmmaker had taken note of the critiques from Hubbert’s

students; since the 2000s, Zhang’s films have celebrated traditional Chinese culture in

magnificent imperial settings, and his Opening Ceremony interwove the references to

Confucianism that he was once criticized for omitting. During the movable type act, performers

in the attire of ancient Confucian scholars recited excerpts from Confucius’s

The Analects

Confucius saw himself as a transmitter of tradition and stressed the study of classical texts as an

essential part of personal cultivation. The movable type act presented Confucianism itself as a

cultural inheritance and Confucius’s writings as part of the canon he encouraged his students to

study.

143

By portraying movable type as both a technological

achievement and a means of

preserving Confucian teachings, the ceremony underscored the value of both innovation and

143

Annping Chin, “

Confucius

.”

Encyclopædia Britannica

July 20, 1998, last updated February 17, 2025.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Confucius

142

It’s significant that this student took note of these two belief systems specifically — while Confucianism

and Daoism are not the only influential religions in China, they are the only ones indigenous to China, whereas

Buddhism was introduced from India and Christianity was brought by western missionaries.

141

Hubbert, “Of Menace and Mimicry,” 423.

tradition, presenting them as complementary forces in a nation that is a “mix of the modern and

the traditional.”

In China, Confucianism holds historical as well as cultural importance. After becoming

the state ideology during the Han dynasty, Confucianism evolved through various neo-Confucian

schools and greatly influenced imperial Chinese politics.

144

Florian Schneider argues that the

Confucian value of harmony also “became a transitive concept that applied across time, even as

it took different forms along the way.”

145

China’s long

history is a common source of national

pride, as reflected in Hubbert’s students’ fascination with the Opening Ceremony’s portrayal of

“China’s 5,000-year history.” One will often hear claims that China has the longest continuous

history in the world, though the starting point of China’s history is a matter of debate.

146

Still, this

5,000-year narrative is widely accepted, reinforcing the country’s traditionalist global image. As

John Ross argues in

You Don’t Know China,

archaeology

services politically conservative

147

agendas: “When dealing with China — whether trying to turn a profit or awaiting democratic

reforms — the implication is you need to be more patient and just wait a little bit longer. After

all, the country has five thousand years of history.”

148

China’s history, regardless of its exact length, boasts a wealth of ancient treasures. Stories

of their rediscovery, whether fictionalized or documentary, are widely popular. Today, historian

148

John Grant Ross,

You Don’t Know Chi na

, (Camphor Press,

2014).

https://www.camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/

147

I use “conservative” here and throughout this chapter to denote literal conservatism, which is to say,

fond of traditional values and averse to change.

146

There were Neolithic cultures producing pottery in what is now China at least 4,000 years ago. Oracle

bone inscriptions with the earliest form of Chinese characters go back 3,000 years. Not long after, bronzes were

found with the word for China,

zhong guo

(

中國

Others

argue that the start of China was its unification under the

Qin emperor in 221 BCE. See also: Charles O. Hucker et al., “History of China”

Encyclopædia Britannica

October

2, 1998, last updated February 26, 2025; C. Aylmer, “

Chinese Oracle Bones

,” Cambridge Digital Library,

https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-CUL-00001-00155/1

; Sima Qian,

Records of the Grand Historian: Qin

dynasty

, translated by Raymond Dawson, (Columbia University

Press, 2007).

https://books.google.com/books?id=ruicEVx96lwC

145

Schneider,

Staging China,

180.

144

“

Confucianism

,”

National Geographic,

August 8, 2024.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/confucianism/

Peter Harmsen claims that Chinese archaeology is experiencing a “golden age.”

149

Against this

backdrop, Zhang’s decision to begin the Opening Ceremony with the

fou

is especially notable.

Relics from ancient China serve as powerful symbols of the country’s cultural wealth. In the past

50 years, the Chinese government has rebuilt old towns — or, more accurately, has constructed

loosely historical replicas of traditional villages outfitted with malls and souvenir shops — to

attract tourists. One striking example is Hongya Cave in Chongqing, often called China’s first

real “cyberpunk city.”

150

At night, Hongya Cave’s architectural facsimiles, lined with LED strips,

take on a sci-fi aesthetic reminiscent of the cyberpunk worlds envisioned in the 1980s, most

famously exemplified by the LA cityscape in Ridley Scott’s

Blade Runner.

The Opening

Ceremony captured this neo-retro Sino aesthetic with drummers in futuristic “Y3K” silver robes

playing ancient bronze instruments.

151

Just as the rafters

of old stilt houses glow with tape lights

in Hongya Cave, the

fou

drums were illuminated against

the dark stadium by their embedded

LED bulbs.

151

“Y3K” is Chinese internet terminology which denotes a fashion trend that has gained traction thanks to

East Asian girl groups. It is characterized by its use of sleek silver attire and holographic jewelry.

150

Asa Roast, “Three Theses on the Sinofuturist City,” in “Sinofuturism(s),” ed. Virginia L. Conn and

Gabriele de Seta.

Verg e: S tu di es i n G lo ba l As ia s

no. 2 (Fall 2021): 81.

149

Peter Harmsen, “

The Indiana Jones Syndrome and the golden age of Chinese archaeology

,”

University

of Oxford School of Archaeology

, August 20, 2021.

https://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/article/indiana-jones-syndrome-and-golden-age-chinese-archaeology

Figure 8: Hongya Cave, Chongqing. “Hongya Cave at night from Qiansimen Bridge,”

uploaded August 18, 2023, Wikimedia Commons.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:202308_Hongya_Cave_at_night_from_Qiansimen_Bri

dge.jpg

The ceremony presented a colorful visual representation of the “mix of the modern and

the traditional” that make China, where ancient technologies are buttressed by newer ones — or

where giant manually-moved type is illuminated by an even larger, computer-animated screen.

The Opening Ceremony framed technological advancements not as a rupture with tradition but

as its natural continuation. This hybridization of modernity and history suggests that China has

always been at the cutting edge while remaining deeply rooted in tradition.

Figure 9: The Opening Ceremony’s typeset was framed by a large computer-animated

screen. Olympics.

Confronting Confucius

But China did not always embrace the cultural heritage the ceremony showcased. The

ceremony’s integration of symbols of Confucianism, nationalism, and modernization would have

been inconceivable just 30 years earlier. For the better part of the past century, political leaders

viewed Confucian traditionalism as an obstacle to national progress and development. As the

Qing dynasty unraveled, Chinese political reformers like Liang Qichao struggled to reconcile

Confucianism with the demands of modernization, viewing them as opposing forces.

152

It was

also Liang who coined the term “sick man of Asia,” or in Chinese,

dongfang bingfu

(

东⽅病夫

to describe China’s political condition in the early 20th century.

153

This phrase came to define

early modern China, marking a period known as the “century of humiliation” that spanned from

the First Opium War to the end of World War II. The drive to heal the “sick man” and resist

western imperial rivals spurred Chinese reform throughout the 20th century. Influenced by

153

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

95.

152

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

101.

western theories of social Darwinism, Liang argued that China’s weakness stemmed from its lack

of “national consciousness” and the inability of Chinese citizens to see themselves as “citizens”

of a unified nation.

154

Liang saw provisional authoritarian rule as essential for making citizens out of the

common people.

155

Liang believed that the people needed

to be instilled with nationalism, the

new, fashionable ideology for developing countries in the 19th century. He lamented that even

those who had immigrated to America “remained so trapped in their attachments to clan, village,

native region, and ancient culture that they were unable to identify with the commonweal and

behave as citizens of a larger, modern nation must.”

156

This notion was later echoed by Sun Yat-Sen, nicknamed the “Father of the Nation.”

157

Sun was initially a staunch advocate for establishing a western-style democracy, and he

attempted, often unsuccessfully, to spark democratic revolutions while in exile.

158

Growing

disillusioned, Sun introduced the concept of an authoritarian “political tutelage” stage —

positioned as a precursor to the final stage of democracy — in his 1918 treatise “Three Stages of

Revolution.”

159

For Sun, instilling nationalist ideals

in the people took precedence over his

aspirations for democracy. Schell and Delury claim that China’s current system of “authoritarian

capitalism” directly draws from Sun’s notion of political tutelage.

160

Like Sun and Liang, Chen Duxiu, the founder of the CCP, also pinpointed insufficient

nationalism as the source of China’s political weakness and blamed Confucian traditionalism,

160

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

140.

159

Theodore de Bary, Richard John Lufrano, Wing-tsit Chan, and John Berthrong,

Sources of Chinese

Tradition, Volume II: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century

(Columbia University Press, 2000), 328-330.

158

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

119.

157

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

119.

156

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

106.

155

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

106.

154

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

98; Schell and

Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

101.

writing that Chinese people “care about their family and do not care about their nation.”

161

Chen

was part of the May Fourth movement of 1919, a radical intellectual movement that rejected

traditional Chinese values.

162

As historian Zhou Cezong

notes, May Fourth youth “were

clamoring against family, against religion, against old morals and old habits, and to break all old

systems” in their desire to break free from oppressive systems. The movement decried tradition

with great fervor, Zhou recalls: “I met someone in front of Beida Hospital. I asked her, ‘What’s

your last name?’ She glared for a while and shouted, ‘I don’t have a surname!’”

163

For May

Fourth intellectuals, adherence to tradition was to blame for China’s humiliation in the Opium

Wars, the domination of foreign spheres of influence, government corruption, and social malaise.

Instead, they placed their faith in the promises of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” hoping

these ideals would modernize China and defend it from western imperialism.

164

The CCP,

drawing from this ideological framework, pledged to destroy the old China, build a new one, and

provide a strong leader to guide the nation on the long march to prosperity.

Mao’s greatest success lay in his ability to dismantle the old order. Hailing from a peasant

background and declaring himself anti-Confucian from an early age, Mao was a lifelong

iconoclast.

165

Under his rule, countless temples, cultural

relics, and historical artifacts —

Confucian or otherwise — were destroyed, and those associated with traditional knowledge were

targeted in his campaign against the “Four Olds” (old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old

habits).

166

No institution or tradition escaped his

sweeping assault. “Criticize Confucius” became

166

Barbara Mittler, “‘

Enjoying the Four Olds!’ Oral

Histories from a “Cultural Desert

,”

The Journal of

Transcultural Studies

4, no. 1 (2013): 177.

https://doi.org/10.11588/ts.2013.1.10798

165

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

201.

164

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

163

Zhou Cezong,

History of the May 4th Movement

(Beijing

University Press, 1955). Translation is my

own.

162

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

150.

161

Lee Feigon,

Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese Communist Party

(Princeton University Press, 1983),

66.

shorthand for denouncing moderates.

167

However, by the end of Mao’s tenure, he failed to sustain

the growth his rule had ignited, and China had not reached the level of strength its leaders had

anticipated.

After Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping — once condemned by Mao as a “capitalist roader”

168

— restored public confidence in the government, appealing to a population exhausted by

constant revolution and persistent poverty with his proclamation to “let some people get rich

first.”

169

Under Deng, the CCP began to reexamine and

rehabilitate China’s cultural heritage.

Once dismissed by revolutionary fervor, Confucianism reemerged as a pillar of patriotism, with

the state actively promoting China’s ancient history as a cornerstone and conduit for modern

achievement. This cultural revival reached a new height during the 2008 Olympics. The Opening

Ceremony did not only celebrate China’s historical legacy: it also streamlined a tumultuous past

marked by wars, civil strife, and cycles of fragmentation and reunification. By invoking

Confucian ideals, the ceremony glossed over China’s periods of chaos and created a seamless

narrative of stability.

Leading up to 2008, a “national studies” fever swept across the country, renewing focus

on Chinese cultural inheritance and Confucianism within academia.

170

As China entered an era of

unprecedented economic prosperity, observers noted similarities with the East Asian “Little

Dragons” — South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan — which shared China’s social

conservatism and Confucian influences. All had attained wealth and power without adopting

democracy, reinforcing the viability of the CCP’s model.

170

Delury; Sheila Melvin, “

Modern Gloss on China’s Golden

Age

,”

New York Times

. September 3, 2007.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/arts/03stud.html

169

Zhang Xiaodan, “Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China,” ed. Deborah S. Davis and Wang

Feng (Stanford University Press, 2009): xiv.

168

Westad and Chen,

The Great Transformation,

109.

167

Westad and Chen,

The Great Transformation,

119.

However, China’s turn toward traditionalism initially faced resistance. Throughout the

1970s and 80s, censorship was less restrictive, and the public made critiques of the government

during the 1978 Democracy Wall Movement, marking the onset of the so-called “Beijing

Spring.”

171

Delury contends that after the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, the state

leveraged Confucianism to reinforce patriarchal governance and legitimize conservative

policies.

172

Deng sought to distinguish economic liberalization

from social liberalization, fearing

the latter could destabilize China’s newfound prosperity.

173

China’s economic system was not

capitalism, Deng claimed, but “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” using Chinese cultural

exceptionalism to justify his opposition to western democracy.

174

After 1989, Confucian studies

institutions proliferated, and by the 1990s, the CCP invoked Confucian ideals to “define the

substance of ‘Chinese characteristics.’”

175

Only four

months after the Tiananmen massacre, Deng

gave a speech at a government-sponsored celebration of Confucius’s birthday in which he

championed the sage’s ideal of “harmony.”

176

Later,

in 2002, Chairman Jiang Zemin gave his

final address to the National People’s Congress, declaring that China had become a “society of

moderate prosperity,” borrowing from the language of Confucius’s

Classic of Rites

. Delury

claims this declaration was a conveyance of the “increasing heterogeneity of the sources of CCP

ideology,” which had by then embraced state-controlled capitalism, papering over the country’s

newly adopted economic policy with ancient aphorisms.

177

Six years later, the Opening

177

Delury has an interesting reading of this term, “moderate prosperity” (

xiaokang shehui

⼩康社会

claims that Jiang’s usage of the term “actually undermined the Confucian ideal even as the CCP seemed to be

moving in a neo-Confucian direction (by using a classical buzzword)” since it had been originally used to describe

“the unjust, imperfect world Confucius saw around him” which he compared to “the utopian vision of ‘great unity’

(

datong

⼤同

in which rulers and ruled worked together

to achieve a shared concept of the common good.” This

vision of “great unity” had adherents from all fronts of Chinese reformism, including in Sino-Marxism. Thus,

176

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

175

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

174

Hagström, “Harmony and the Quest for Soft Power,” 510.

173

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China”; Westad and Chen,

The Great Transformation,

303.

172

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China”; Westad and Chen,

The Great Transformation,

303.

171

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China”; David C. Turnley, Peter Liu, Peter Turnley, and Melinda Liu,

Beijing

Spring

(Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989): 19.

Ceremony syncretized symbols from ancient, imperial, and modern China to present a vision of

modernity “with Chinese characteristics” — a version of development that is China’s own,

circumventing accusations of westernization.

While nationalist politicians initially dismissed Confucianism as antithetical to their

goals, they later retooled it to reinforce state power. Though Confucianism had once seemed at

odds with industrial progress, the state realized the ideology’s utility in filibustering social

reform. Moreover, to borrow sociologist Anthony Smith’s terminology, the CCP employs

Confucianism as a tool of

ethnosymbolism

, using shared

cultural symbols, myths, and traditions

to forge a collective national identity.

178

Pro-democracy

dissident Liu Xiaobo once remarked that

the Confucianism promoted by the state gained acceptance because “the Chinese search for a

spiritual crutch in the ancient culture that once made them proud.”

179

Confucianism — or at least

its curated representation — became crucial in shaping national identity after Mao’s cultural

rupture.

Though the 2008 Opening Ceremony omitted Maoism, its exclusion was unsurprising —

how could a project of cultural formation reference a historical period defined by cultural

destruction? By erasing ruptures, Zhang constructed a narrative of an unbroken 5,000-year

civilization. In doing so, he aimed to restore both his reputation and that of his people — a

people encouraged to champion China’s cultural distinctions from its neighbors and competitors,

even if such distinctions were, at least in part, manufactured.

179

Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin,

New Ghosts, Old Dreams:

Chinese Rebel Voices

, (Times Books,

1992): 385.

178

Anthony D. Smith,

Nationalism and Modernism

(Routledge,

1998): 170.

concludes Delury, this was an affirmation of the neoliberal capitalist measures put forward by Deng’s reforms,

telegraphing that “the CCP was no longer the party of utopian ‘great unity’ à la the Great Leap Forward and Great

Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It would pursue the more modest goal of moderate prosperity, and people were free

to pursue their self-interests.” Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

One World, One Dream

By the time Hu Jintao took office, the failures of his predecessor’s vision for a society of

“moderate prosperity” were apparent. With China’s unchecked economic growth, the national

wealth disparity increased, as did the number of reported local protests. Until the government

stopped releasing annual statistics in 2006, there were up to tens of thousands of such protests

reported every year.

180

Experts estimate that by the

end of Hu’s term in 2013, the number of

protests was close to 200,000.

181

As Delury notes, “Party

documents dealing with harmony

openly acknowledge the discord caused by increasing disparities between rich and poor and city

and countryside.”

182

In 2004, as a direct response to

popular demonstrations, Hu implemented

policies meant to create a “harmonious society” and a “harmonious world,” asserting that

“harmony carries the most meaning for Chinese culture.”

183

“Harmony” was both shorthand for

Chinese cultural and philosophical tradition and an essential component to the CCP’s project of

modernization and national rebranding.

184

Integrating Confucianism into Hu’s agenda, however, required maneuvering. Liu Xiaobo

saw Hu’s Confucianism as “a sales pitch that combines tall tales about the ancients with insights

that are about as sophisticated as the lyrics of pop songs.”

185

Delury analyzes a segment of Hu’s

speech announcing his doctrine, in which Hu misattributed the maxim “harmony is prized above

all” to Confucius; this quote came from one of the sage’s disciples, who maintained that harmony

185

Barmé and Jaivin,

New Ghosts, Old Dreams,

385.

184

Zeng Xiangming, “Interpreting the Soft Power of the ‘Chinese Dream,’” “‘

Zhongguomeng’ De

Ruanshili Jiedu,

” (“

解读

“

中国梦

”

的软实⼒

”),

Fujian Theory Studies

8 (2014): 4–6;

Tao Shaoxing “Deconstructing

‘China Threat Theory’: The Pursuit of Harmonious World in the Chinese Dream,”

Journal of Nanchang Hangkong

University: Social Sciences

17, no. 1 (2015): 19.

183

Hu Jintao, “Build towards a Harmonious World of Lasting Peace and Common Prosperity,” “

Guanyu

Goujian Shehuizhuyi Hexie Shehui Jianghua Quanwen

”

(“

关于构建社会主义和谐社会的讲话（全⽂

)”),

Chinanet

, 2005; Josh Chin, “The Most ‘Chinese’ Chinese

Character?” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2010.

182

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

181

Thomas Orlik, “Unrest Grows as Economy Booms,”

Wall

Street Journal

, September 26, 2011.

180

William Freeman, “The Accuracy of China’s ‘Mass Incidents,’”

Financial Times

, March 2, 2010.

must be balanced with “a sense of ritual propriety.”

186

In the same speech, Delury notes that Hu

cherry-picked quotes from various ancient texts, including one from the

Classic of Rites

— “all

men are brothers within the four seas”— which, according to Delury, strips “Confucianism of its

core familial and particularist ethics.”

187

Notably,

performers at the 2008 Opening Ceremony also

recited this quote. Delury says that, in deploying ancient thinkers and texts to bolster his political

agenda, Hu “ignored the subtlety and tension in classical arguments over the term’s significance,

presenting instead a generic picture of sages ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, all

agreeing that everyone should get along with one another.”

188

While Confucian thought has

historically embraced syncretism, Hu ultimately failed to articulate a coherent model for his ideal

society. Instead of formulating a new, nuanced ideology, he reduced harmony to a tool for

encouraging assimilation and political obsequiousness — a stark contrast to Confucius’s original

vision of the virtue.

Hu’s “Harmonious Society” doctrine encompassed a series of reforms and policies aimed

at sustaining the state-controlled, market-driven growth introduced by Deng with an emphasis on

developing rural areas to narrow the wealth gap.

189

It also instituted policies that responded to

social unrest in China, which surged at its border with Tibet.

190

In 2005, Hu’s administration

drafted laws tightening control on speech about the government, limiting the activities of NGOs,

and censoring internet discourse.

191

The same year,

the slogan for the upcoming Olympics was

191

Fan, “

China’s Party Leadership Declares New Priority

.”

190

Fan, “

China’s Party Leadership Declares New Priority

”;

Roger Barnett “

Thunder from Tibet,

”

New York

Review of Books

, May 1, 2008.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/05/29/thunder-from-tibet/

189

Maureen Fan, “

China’s Party Leadership Declares New

Priority: 'Harmonious Society

,’”

The

Wash ington Post

. October 12, 2006.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/10/12/chinas-party-leadership-declares-new-priority-harmon

ious-society-span-classbankheaddoctrine-proposed-by-president-hu-formally-endorsedspan/0dea45bb-b120-4ab7-8b

34-e867d308ae4b/

188

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

187

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

186

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

unveiled: “One World, One Dream,” a seemingly benign platitude that gestured at Hu’s attempt

to “harmonize” his increasingly fractured country.

192

Hagström theorizes that “harmony” played

a crucial role in enhancing China’s appeal to international visitors during the Olympics.

193

Claims

to harmony are, Hagström says, “made in attempts to attract domestic and international

audiences,” and “by portraying itself as harmonious, Chinese leaders thus seek to convey China’s

overall benignity to the world and to attract domestic and international audiences.”

194

This view

assumes that the ceremony’s goal was to communicate harmony, but the ceremony did not

merely signal unity — it also generated a shared affective experience. In this sense, the ceremony

was not just a representation of “harmony” but a performance that sought to produce it as lived

reality.

194

Hagström, “Harmony and the Quest for Soft Power,” 508.

193

Schneider examines several instances in the ceremony that, in his view, illustrate China’s appeals to

harmony as “discursive statements about how humanity should strive for world peace.” As part of China’s

demonstration of its commitment to peace, the ceremony featured symbolic elements such as “white doves, foreign

performers alongside Chinese actors, images of foreign children,” and a large inflatable globe in the final segment.

Atop this globe stood singers Sarah Brightman, an English performer, and Liu Huan, a Chinese singer, holding

hands as they performed “You and Me” in both Mandarin and English:

“Come together, put your hand in mine.

You

and me, from one world, we are family.” “

来吧！朋友，伸出你的⼿，我和你，⼼连⼼，永

远

⼀家⼈

.”

Schneider,

Staging China,

182-185.

192

IOC, “

Beijing 2008: One World, One Dream

,” June 27, 2005.

https://olympics.com/ioc/news/beijing-2008-one-world-one-dream

Figure 10: The juxtaposition of the

(

和

)

character’s

earlier form with its modern script.

Olympics.

Figure 11: The Confucian disciples. Olympics.

We may see the visual performance of the state’s reimagined Confucianism through cues

in the movable type act. It began with Confucian disciples in black-and-white robes, reminiscent

of anthropomorphized ink brushes like the dancers in the preceding paper act. Like the

drummers, the disciples chanted and moved in synchronization, using bound bamboo rods as

their percussive instruments. Unlike the drummers, however, the disciples’ movements were

restricted by their gowns and rods. They spun, marched, and bowed to the large screen at the

center of the floor, where a movable typeset had risen in place of the giant paper scroll. The

typeset moved in mesmerizing waves, foreshadowing the seafaring Zheng He compass act. From

the typeset emerged the first formation of the character for harmony, almost unrecognizable in its

ancient script.

The disciples continued their chant, arms raised toward the typeset as if addressing a

master with their prayer-like proclamations. Ripples emerged from within the press, expanding

outward from a single point. The circular ripples gradually transformed into concentric

rectangles, forming convex and concave pyramids — perhaps in an allusion to the ancient

pyramids, another monumental feat of engineering, precision, and intense labor. The interplay of

circles and rectangles is similarly symbolic: In ancient China, the square represents earth, and the

circle represents Heaven. These two forms are united by the movement of the type blocks,

harmonized by the humans that power them.

195

As the performance continued, a second early Chinese character for harmony appeared,

followed by its most modern version. The Opening Ceremony’s presentation of the character’s

195

Humans are also often seen as the link between heaven and earth: “For at bottom Heaven, Earth, the

myriad things and man form one body. The point at which this unity is manifested in its most refined and excellent

form is the clear intelligence of the human mind.” Wang Yangming,

Instructions for Practical Living

and Other

Neo-Confucian Writings

, trans. by Wing-tsit Chan (Columbia

University Press, 1963), 221-222.

https://archive.org/details/instructionsforp00wang/page/n7/mode/2up

linguistic development aligns with how the ceremony presented history itself: mythic yet true,

shape-shifting yet orderly. Harmony, too, would seem to have a 5,000-year history. The lights cut

out before an angular, raised gash grew out of the press, invoking the Great Wall — China’s own

Pyramids of Giza. Bright pink plum blossoms emerged from the blocks of type, swaying before

the performers themselves appeared. While the audience enjoyed a flawlessly coordinated

performance, each dancer was only aware of the precise moment to lift their small box, unable to

see the pictures they created. As the performers smiled and waved to the crowd, their drenched

faces and fatigued expressions divulged months of grueling practice and tireless work to

harmonize movement from those dark, confined cells.

If Zhang’s movies from the 1990s made him well-known, the 2008 Opening Ceremony

made him a true star. After the Games were over, Zhang won a Peabody Award “for creating a

spell-binding, unforgettable celebration of the Olympic promise, featuring a cast of

thousands.”

196

He was a runner-up for

Time

’s Person

of the Year. Steven Spielberg, who once

considered joining the team of creative directors for the Beijing Olympic ceremonies, described

Zhang’s work in

Time

: “This year he captured this

prevalent theme of harmony and peace, which

is the spirit of the Olympic Games,” building on what Spielberg called the “desire for inner

peace” that he believed permeated Zhang’s oeuvre.

197

Harmony, it turned out, was a fantastic

selling point.

197

“

Person Of The Year 2008

,”

Time

, December 17, 2008.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081219174746/http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/personoftheyear/article/0,31

682,1861543_1865103_1865107,00.html

196

68th Annual Peabody Awards

, May 2009.

http://www.peabodyawards.com/award-profile/beijing-olympics-opening-ceremony-and-zhang-yimou

Being Harmonized

Just as there are material benefits to harmonious

nationalism, there are also material

costs. Less than five months before the Olympics, Chinese officials were dealing with civil

unrest on the western border. March 10, 2008, marked the 49th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan

uprising which led to the exile of the 14th Dalai Lama, who released a statement commemorating

the event:

China is emerging as a powerful country due to her great economic progress. This is to be

welcomed but… the world is eagerly waiting to see how the present Chinese leadership

will put into effect its avowed concepts of ‘harmonious society’ and ‘peaceful rise.’ For

the realization of these concepts, economic progress alone will not suffice…

198

That day, hundreds of Tibetan monks marched from Drepung Monastery to Lhasa in peaceful

protest against the PLA’s targeted imprisonment of Tibetan dissidents and restrictions on their

cultural and religious practices.

199

Chinese security

responded with force.

200

The 2008 uprising would become one of the bloodiest in recent Chinese history,

escalating into a days-long conflict with civilian protestors in Lhasa targeting Han and Hui

(Muslim) Chinese business owners.

201

The protestors

hoped staging a conflict so close to the

Olympics would draw international attention, and they were right.

202

The uprising fueled western

fears about the consequences of authoritarian rule in China. International organizations,

including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, called for the boycott of the Opening

202

Lopez, “How to Think About Tibet,” 42.

201

Merkel-Hess, et al.,

China in 2008,

39.

200

Lopez, “How to Think About Tibet,” 42.

199

Donald S. Lopez, “How to Think About Tibet” in

China

in 2008 : A Year of Great Significance,

ed.

Merkel-Hess, Kate, et al., 42; it is also important to note that there were significant demonstrations prior to March

10, though this day holds particular international significance.

198

Barnett, “

Thunder from Tibet

” ; “

Lhasa under Siege

,”

The Economist

, March 17, 2008.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2008/03/17/lhasa-under-siege

Ceremony.

203

Meanwhile, Chinese citizens were outraged by videos of attacks against Chinese

settlers in Tibet that circulated online.

204

China’s vision of “one world” came at the cost of Tibetan sovereignty and, on another

level, the recognition of ethnic differences. Controversy erupted when the organizers of the

Games confirmed allegations that the Olympic flag-raising troupe of 56 children — one for

every recognized Chinese ethnic minority, each dressed in the corresponding traditional attire —

were all, in fact, Han Chinese.

205

Wang Wei, the vice

president of the Games, defended the

decision, explaining that “it is typical for Chinese performers to wear different apparel from

different ethnic groups,” to symbolize how they are “friendly and happy together.”

206

The

inclusion of colorful garments is supposedly sufficient for minority representation because the

state fails to publicly recognize cultural differences between China’s ethnic minorities and the

Han majority. Symbolically, Han identity is made universal. Indeed, Han has always been a fluid

category, evolving with the growth of the Chinese state and cannibalizing other ethnicities in the

process.

207

Characterizing assimilation as “harmony”

allows the state to paint dissidents,

including Tibetan protesters, as enemies of harmony and progress. While international support

for Tibet surged in 2008, Chinese nationalism was only reaffirmed by the uprising domestically.

In his essay “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” Pankaj Mishra explains that “a largely Han

nation sympathized with the Han Chinese who had been attacked by Tibetan mobs.”

208

Merkel-Hess, Kate, et al.,

China in 2008,

39.

207

For example, the Minyue people were gradually subsumed into the Han majority during the process of

cultural and political integration in the early imperial periods, particularly under the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220

CE). However, it’s worth noting that “ethnicity,” similarly to “race,” is generally a slippery category that defies rigid

delineation as it is constantly socially constructed. See: Yang Kuan (

杨宽

Zhanguo shi

(

战国史

) (

Shanghai

People's Press, July 2016).

206

Goldsmith, “

Ethnic children faked at Games opening

.”

205

Belinda Goldsmith, “

Ethnic children faked at Games

opening

,”

Reuters,

August 15, 2008.

204

Merkel-Hess, et al.,

China in 2008,

39.

203

Allison Welch, “

Human Rights in China: 2008 Beijing

Summer Olympics

,”

Human Rights & Human

Welfare

9, no. 1 (2009): 210.

Figure 12: The parade of China’s recognized ethnic minorities. Olympics.

The 2008 Games have thus been described as a mass distraction from the Tibetan

Uprising. Florian Schneider argues that the Games were “a modern-day version of the infamous

Roman imperial practice of providing the subjugated masses with bread and games.”

209

Academic Haiyan Lee agrees, adding that it is “better to party en masse than to flex massive

military muscles.”

210

However, the ceremony did not

simply serve as a distraction — it also

provided the perfect platform to reinforce and project a Han Chinese-centric state narrative.

Beyond the half-hearted attempt at minority representation during the flag-raising, the Opening

Ceremony made few references to China’s diverse influences. The ceremony’s historical

narrative illustrated the development of imperial China without reference to the two major

dynasties led by non-Han ethnic minorities

211

and offered

few symbols of Tibetan culture. There

were no obvious Buddhist symbols, despite Buddhism’s significant influence on Chinese culture.

211

That is, the Yuan and the Qing.

210

Haiyan Lee, “It’s Right to Party, En Masse,” in

China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance,

ed.

Merkel-Hess, et al., 176.

209

Schneider,

Staging China,

23.

Figure 13: Four activists from Students for a Free Tibet unfurled a banner spelling out “Free

Tibet” in Beijing’s Olympic Park. The activists were eventually detained by security personnel.

Wikimedia; Associated Press, “

China Detains Activists

after Unfurling ‘Free Tibet’ Banner

,”

Fox News, January 14, 2015.

Figure 14: Google Ngram result for “Free Tibet” displays a peak in mentions in 2008 and a sharp

decline after 2009.

After the wave of Tibetan protests subsided and the Games were over, news cycles

shifted focus, and the issue of Tibetan independence faded from international attention.

212

However, preparation for the Games included the installation of surveillance cameras and

monitoring devices in Tibet and Beijing which remained in place even after the Games, creating

212

In hindsight, Chinese media has been remarkably successful in silencing claims for Tibetan recognition.

There is little coverage of the Tibetan protests that occurred outside the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium during the

Games or the “Tibetan Olympics” that activist Lobsang Wangyal staged in Dharamshala in May of 2008. See: “

One

World Many Dreams, Tibetan Olympics to begin from May 22

.”

gangkyi.com

. May 16, 2008.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110711072052/http://gangkyi.com/news_detail.php?id=493

a “lasting mechanism” of control, as described by China’s minister of public security.

213

Western

protests over China’s treatment of Tibetan protestors only fueled Han ethnonationalism as

Chinese nationals grew increasingly indignant about the confrontations they faced during the

torch relay.

214

Hagström argues that Confucian soft power fosters a “self/other dichotomization”

that strengthens Chinese nationalism by positioning it in opposition to the non-Confucian west.

215

Western sympathy for Tibet reinforced a “self/other dichotomization” not only between Chinese

people and westerners but also between Han Chinese and Tibetans, only compounded by the

anger many Chinese civilians felt over the violence Tibetan protesters inflicted upon individual

Chinese settlers.

Of course, unrest in Tibet did not begin or end in 2008. China has long had territorial

conflicts with Tibet, which is rich in precious minerals. Tensions escalated significantly in 2006

when the Chinese government built a railroad bringing thousands of Chinese settlers into

Lhasa.

216

This new railroad expedited industrial development

in Tibet but also displaced its

people, quickly drawing accusations of settler colonialism.

217

While defenders of the CCP point

to the economic benefits Tibet has received from Chinese intervention, critics argue that Tibet’s

development is precisely what has fueled discontent in the region.

218

Mishra writes that “Deng

218

“Beijing hopes that the new rail link to Lhasa, which makes possible the cheap extraction of Tibet’s

uranium and copper, will bring about

kuayueshi fazhan

[

跨越式发展

] (‘

leapfrog development’

)...

Tibet has been

enlisted into what is the biggest and swiftest modernization in history: China’s development on the model of

consumer capitalism.” Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” 40.

217

Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” 40.

216

Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” 40.

215

Hagström, “Harmony and the Quest for Soft Power,” 518.

214

“During the initial torch lighting ceremony in Athens, two members of Reporters Without Borders

rushed the stadium field, waving black flags. For the torch, this marked the beginning of a tumultuous journey. In

San Francisco, London, and Paris, police officers created a ‘human shield’ around the torch to protect it from

thousands of protesters. Despite this, the torch was momentarily extinguished by protesters in both London and

Paris. The planned route through Pakistan was altered due to fear of militant interference. Protests surrounding the

torch’s journey were also reported in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Argentina, India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and

Vietnam.” Welch, “Human Rights in China,” 212-213.

213

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

376; Joseph Fewsmith, “‘Social management’ as a Way of Coping

with Heightened Social Tensions,”

China Leadership

Monitor

, no.36 (January 26, 2012), 6.

Xiaoping’s post-Tiananmen gamble — that people intoxicated with prosperity will not demand

political change — failed in Tibet.” He attributes this failure to the rural living conditions in

much of Tibet: Tibetans were not accustomed to, nor did they generally support, urbanization.

Andrew Martin Fischer argues that the CCP’s development of Tibet has come at the expense of

Tibetan empowerment, noting that the region’s uneven growth primarily benefits Han Chinese

developers.

219

Historian Ravni Thakur states the socioeconomic

divide between Han developers

and indigenous Tibetans is “corroborated by any visit to Tibet where it is noticeable how the Han

dominate all urban sectors.”

220

However, urbanization and industrialization were highly successful in promoting

nationalism in China’s Han-dominant regions. Scholar Annisa Lee traces modern Han Chinese

nationalism to Deng’s 1978 economic reforms. “Chinese ethnic nationalism and pride,” she

writes, “was buoyed by the New China’s rapid economic democratic growth, military

modernization, cultural and educational development and forming of new collectivism and

unity.”

221

In contrast, widespread skepticism about

modernization in Tibet, as Mishra argues, led

to the failure of the “belief in the utopia of modernity — a consumer lifestyle in urban centers —

promised by China.”

222

Fischer notes that many Tibetans

rejected the state’s forced Sinization,

even though it brought financial benefits, improved education, and increased white-collar work

opportunities.

223

Many Tibetans were unconvinced that

a higher GDP would lead to the general

improvement of life. As Fischer notes, China’s economic integration of Tibet entailed increased

223

Fischer,

The Disempowered Development of Tibet in

China,

251.

222

Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” 41.

221

Annisa Lai Lee, “Did the Olympics Help the Nation Branding of China? Comparing Public Perception

of China with the Olympics before and after the 2008 Beijing Olympics in Hong Kong,”

Place Branding and

Public

Diplomacy

6, no. 3 (2010): 209.

220

Ravni Thakur, “The Marginalization of Tibetans in Tibet: Rethinking the Development Story.”

Development and Change

47, no.1 (2016): 203–17.

https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12214

219

Fischer,

The Disempowered Development of Tibet in

China,

11.

marginalization, which strengthened political resistance.

224

The 2008 Tibetan uprising can thus

be understood as an anti-capitalist struggle as well as an ethnic conflict.

Mishra provocatively contends that “Tibetans are not much more politically important

than the hundreds of hapless Chinese uprooted by China’s Faustian pact with consumer

capitalism.”

225

Indeed, many Han Chinese citizens are also affected by the state’s prioritization of

industry and infrastructure. In 2008, the BOCOG admitted that at least 15,000 Beijing residents

were displaced in the construction of the Olympic infrastructure. However, the Forced Migration

Review estimates the number to be as high as 1.25 million, making 2008 one of the most

devastating Games in terms of housing displacement.

226

Mishra points out that similar conflicts exist in democratic nations as well, drawing

comparisons with struggles in his home country of India. He writes that farmers and tribal

members in West Bengal and Odisha “confront a murderous axis of politicians, businessmen, and

militias determined to corral their ancestral lands into a global network of profit.”

227

A similar

comparison can be made with the historic and ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples in the

Americas. Again, Hu’s emphasis on harmony did not emerge from protests for democracy or

ethnic recognition but as a response to “discord caused by increasing disparities between rich and

poor and city and countryside.”

228

Scholars have noted

similar patterns in Xinjiang: ethnographer

Thomas Cliff refers to the political situation in Xinjiang as “lucrative chaos,” where Uyghur land

228

Delury, “‘Harmonious’ in China.”

227

Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” 41.

226

Nick Mulvenney, “

Beijing says 15,000 relocated for

Games venues

,”

Reuters

. February 19, 2008.

225

Mishra, “At War with the Utopia of Modernity,” 41.

224

Fischer,

The Disempowered Development of Tibet in

China,

11.

dispossession and debt growth result from the collaboration between Chinese government

officials and entrepreneurs.

229

In this context, one might view conventional coverage of the 2008 Tibetan uprising as a

distraction in its own right. By framing the conflict as primarily ethnic, the media obscured the

shared experiences of exploitation and dispossession faced by both Tibetans and Han Chinese,

undermining potential cross-ethnic solidarity. Schell and Delury claim that “the biggest new

battlefield in Hu Jintao’s campaign to impose harmony on an increasingly outspoken and

freewheeling society was online.”

230

Hu’s “Great Firewall”

censored websites and posts that did

not align with party ideology. Chinese netizens who found themselves on the wrong side of the

firewall coined the term

bei hexie

(

被和谐

), “

being harmonized,”

to describe the state’s virtual

suppression.

231

Enforcing the “self/other dichotomization” enabled China to refer to military personnel

deployed in Xinjiang as “harmony makers” while vilifying advocates for Tibetan independence,

such as the Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo, as “disharmonious.”

232

This framework positioned Han

Chinese as the “self” and “disharmonious” ethnic minorities as the “other,” creating a logic that

allowed Han Chinese people to wear the clothing of Tibetans and Uyghurs because of an

assumed “sameness” within the nation, while on the other hand confirming that Tibetans and

232

“Thousands of Harmony Makers Sent to Urumqi Communities While Authorities Vow Harsh

Punishment against Syringe Attackers”

Xinhua

, September

6, 2009.

http://tr.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zt/xjzzq/200909/t20090907_1431801.htm

; Embassy of the PRC to the USA

“Chinese Embassy Spokesman Wang Baodong: Don’t Politicize the Nobel Peace Prize,”

USA Today

, December 10,

2010.

231

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

377.

230

Schell and Delury,

Wealt h and Power,

376.

229

Tim Summers, “Ethnic conflict and protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s west and China’s

frontier regions: ethnicity, economic integration and foreign relations,”

International Affairs

93, no. 3 (May 2017):

754.

Uyghurs were bellicose and fundamentally different, thus requiring forced assimilation and

suppression under Hu’s “Harmonious Society” doctrine.

Harmony, as defined by the state, involves alignment with China’s “rags to riches”

Cinderella story. Popular investment in this vision encourages allegiance to the state’s agenda of

wealth creation. Recall Zhang Lijia’s interviewee who said, “We were called the ‘sick man of

Asia.’ Now we are strong and rich enough to hold such a major international event.”

233

Hu’s

framework for a “harmonious society” makes economic development a source of national pride,

positioning state-led economic progress as both a justification for and a means of securing public

allegiance. Those who challenge this narrative, particularly ethnic minorities, are labeled as

outsiders and disruptors.

Zhang Yimou witnessed China’s awe-inspiring economic transformation firsthand. In

many ways, the trajectory of his life mirrored his country’s rapid growth. At the beginning of his

career, he sold a pint of his blood to afford his first camera, and his first films explored the harsh

realities of poverty. Now, a multimillionaire and China’s most famous director, Zhang creates

films about martial glory and imperial grandeur. But nothing Zhang or any future Opening

Ceremony director would do could compare to 2008.

The 2008 ceremonies concluded abruptly for Zhang. The thousands of people who had

worked with him for months, if not years, boarded planes the very next day. What had begun

with such ostentation ended with little fanfare. “All of a sudden, all the people were gone, and

the building was empty,” Zhang recalled. “A sense of being neglected arose. When I woke up the

following day, I found that the Olympic Games had gone away.”

234

By morning, a project that

234

Long Wei and Bei Ke,

Zhang Yimou: From a Man of Northwest

China to the Chief Director of the 2008

Beijing Olympic Games

(China Pictorial Publishing

House, 2009), 251.

233

Zhang Lijia, “Hand Grenades and the Olympics,” 168.

had consumed seven years of Zhang’s life was over. The thousands of unnamed people who had

contributed to that “brilliant bloom” — now no longer Zhang’s human machinery — quietly

returned to their lives, unnoticed. It was as if it had all been nothing more than a dream.

CONCLUSION: What Does China’s Future Hold?

In 2008, modern Chinese methods were disguised as tradition. As robed drummers

quoted

The

Analects

, a casual observer might not realize

that the Confucianism the CCP

endorsed was, in some ways, newer than the LED technology the

fou

drum models were outfitted

with. The kind of mass spectacle Zhang employed to depict ancient China’s splendor was a

product of the Industrial Age and refined during the Cultural Revolution. Yet it is often not

China’s past but its future that the west is concerned with. “China is the future” is a dictum one

will hear repeated in conversations, op-eds, and economic forecasts. Recall Ebert’s cautionary

remark: “Today, from a standing start, China has the world’s third-largest economy. We are first,

but sinking. They’re rising.” The Opening Ceremony’s appeals to the past were ultimately grand

gestures toward its utopian vision of the future.

As Beijing prepared for the 2008 Games, discourse about China’s future — and the

means China would take to achieve it — gave rise to the term “Sinofuturism,” often attributed to

musician and theorist Steve Goodman. He described Sinofuturism as a “darkside cartography of

the turbulent rise of East Asia” that grafts “seemingly heterogeneous elements” onto “the

topology of planetary capitalism.”

235

This framework

offers a valuable lens for understanding

China’s self-presentation in the 2008 Opening Ceremony, as well as its broader vision for

modernity. Sinofuturism is more than just an aesthetic — it is a mechanism through which the

CCP projects China as a formidable global power while simultaneously invoking a civilizational

tradition rooted in Confucianism. This tradition, as discussed in Chapter Two, has been reshaped

over the past century to align with state ideology. The 2008 Beijing Opening Ceremony was, in

235

Steve Goodman “Fei ch’ien Rinse Out: Sino-futurist Undercurrency,”

Pli: The Warwick Journal of

Philosophy

7 (1998): 155.

essence, a time capsule of China’s projected future. Nearly two decades later, we can assess how

accurate those projections were, examining how China’s present is shaped by the ideological

visions and economic policies of the 2000s.

Almost a decade after the 2008 Opening Ceremony, artist Lawrence Lek expanded on the

concept of Sinofuturism in a video essay he calls its “retroactive manifesto.”

236

Sinofuturism is

not an identity claimed by the Chinese state but a term used by critics, making Lek’s perspective

particularly notable — his manifesto is one of the most optimistic interpretations of

Sinofuturism, or at least one that is not straightforwardly critical of the CCP’s ambitions. In

Sinofuturism

, Lek adopts the perspective of the state

itself, assessing Chinese stereotypes based

on their alignment with state priorities. Lek states:

Whether Chinese Olympic athletes are branded as ‘robots,’ or Chinese students or

tourists are likened to ‘swarms,’ or Shenzhen factory workers are criticised for ‘flooding

the marketplace,’ the subtext is the same. It is the dehumanisation of the individual into a

nameless, faceless mass.

237

Rather than rejecting such characterizations, Lek argues that Sinofuturism embraces them. To

answer critiques of Chinese Olympic athletes and Shenzhen factory workers, Lek’s Sinofuturism

leans into the cultural assumption that Confucian societies are driven by collectivism, spurred by

a desire for social harmony. As discussed in Chapter Two, the “traditionalism” of Confucian

values is complicated by China’s history of negotiation with Confucianism. However, the

broader idea of collectivism can also be linked to communist ideology, creating a helpful

paradigm in which both ancient and modern China are united by the same unifying principle.

237

Lek, “

Sinofuturism

中华未来主义

.”

236

Lawrence Lek, “

Sinofuturism

中华未来主义

,”

Sinofuturism.com

2016, video, 1 hour.

https://sinofuturism.com/

This deliberate embrace of orientalist tropes reflects the cultural phenomenon of

“techno-Orientalism,” a concept first introduced by Kevin Morley and David Robins.

238

Techno-Orientalism, as the term implies, replaces traditional Orientalist stereotypes depicting

Asia as culturally backward and technologically deficient with tropes that cast Asia as a

mechanized hub of technological production, driven by hypercapitalist market forces and ulterior

motives.

239

It fuses colonial-era views of Asian bodies

as coolie hordes with modern “model

minority” myths that frame Asian minds as unfeeling, hyper-rational calculators.

In many sci-fi

narratives, Asians or Asian-coded figures appear as robots, aliens, or clones, and often en

masse.

240

Whether depicted as a looming force of global

domination or as morally neutral

automatons, these figures embody western anxieties that see East Asia’s rise as both inevitable

and unsettling.

Yet, techno-Orientalism can serve the Chinese state’s rebranding efforts in how it fits

within the cultural frameworks (primarily western) foreign nations already use to understand

China. After all, it is easier to manipulate existing stereotypes than to dismantle them entirely. As

Lek states, “Sinofuturism answers the Chinese problems of physical servitude, intellectual

conformity, and computational OCD, by openly embracing Artificial Intelligence.” Instead of

challenging stereotypes that portray Chinese people as an unthinking collective, Lek’s

Sinofuturism simply dismisses the western idealization of individuality. Lek’s allegory defines

individuals not as discrete entities but as nodes of a unified whole; artificial intelligence is a

useful metaphor as it is better understood as a system or collective rather than a singular entity.

241

“Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) Artist Talk with Lawrence Lek,” posted by “Visual Arts Centre of

Clarington,” YouTube video, 1:18:18, June 9, 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67rfO1VQjH0

240

Michelle N. Huang,

Inhuman Figures

, Smithonian Asian

Pacific American Center, video, 23:53.

https://apa.si.edu/inhuman-figures/

239

David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu,

Techno-Orientalism:

Imagining Asia in Speculative

Fiction, History, and Media

(Rutgers University Press,

2015), 1-19.

238

David Morley and Kevin Robins,

Spaces of Identity:

Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural

Boundaries

(Routledge, 1995).

Lek’s allegory is especially fitting because AI, like the 2008 Opening Ceremony,

showcases the power of large-scale human labor — and China’s ability to mobilize it. Though

AI, much like the Mechanical Turk, is often perceived as autonomous, it ultimately relies on

hidden human effort.

242

But the ceremony’s movable type installation does not sustain the

illusion of machine independence for long — it culminates in a reveal of its nearly 900 operators.

The performance also draws a direct lineage between China’s contemporary technological

achievements and historical feats like the Great Wall, both framed as triumphs of collective

labor. Sinofuturism aestheticizes the entanglement of human effort and machine progress,

wrenching artifacts of the past to prefigure the future.

Figure 15: The Opening Ceremony’s depiction of the Great Wall during the “movable

type” act features a digital rendering of the wall at the edges of the large screen “scroll” framed

by the type blocks. Olympics.

Jennifer Rhee writes extensively about the potential of such anti-humanist frameworks to

capture the lived experiences of Asians laboring under the shadow of western hegemony. She

asks:

Who is the human who is de facto valorized and normativized through the

anthropomorphic visions that organize robotics? Who, in their purported

incommensurability, unknowability, unfamiliarity, or illegibility within robotics’

242

I invoke the Mechanical Turk because it is frequently referenced in contemporary discussions about AI

to illustrate the gap between appearance and reality in machine intelligence.

narrow views of humanness, is excluded, erased, dehumanized, rendered

not-human?

243

For Rhee,

anthropomorphic frameworks only perpetuate the colonial logic that historically

subjugated non-white peoples. The first fish-gutting machine in America was nicknamed the

“Iron Chink” — a stark reminder that, as Lisa Lowe argues, the Asian body has long been

rendered illegible within western conceptions of humanity. Lowe points out that it was this

dehumanization of the “other” that precipitated the economic conditions that allowed western

nations to prosper and promote theories of “liberal humanism.”

244

In their essay on ethnofuturisms, Merve Verlag, Armen Avanessian, and Mahan Moalemi

assert that movements like Sinofuturism negotiate between valuing tradition — that is, ethnic

loyalty — and modernization. This balance enables such movements to function

“not [as] an

ideology but a way to survive as well as a

modus

vivendi

.”

245

Similarly, Lek claims that the goal

of Sinofuturism is not originality or liberation but

survival

246

China’s survival in the current age

depends on how successfully it can adopt western economic principles while preserving Chinese

“character,” whatever that may mean.

Lek’s interpretation of Sinofuturism helps explain the embrace of the trope of the

“nameless, faceless” Asian in the 2008 Opening Ceremony, illustrated by performers who

functioned as blocks of movable type, pixels on an LED clock, or threads of an invisible ink

brush. The

illegibility of the individual within the

ceremony is the

intentional rejection of

western values of individuality and independence. The racialized mechanization of the human

body has long been an essential part of the global economy, and the championing of this

246

Lek, “

Sinofuturism

中华未来主义

.”

245

Merve Verlag, Armen Avanessian, Mahan Moalemi, “

Ethnofuturisms:

Findings in Common and

Conflicting Futures

,” (Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur

und Natur, 2018), 16.

https://www.academia.edu/36782398/Avanessian_Moalemi_Ethnofuturisms_intro_pdf

244

Lisa Lowe,

Intimacies of the Four Continents

, (Duke

University Press, 2015), 2.

243

Jennifer Rhee,

The Robotic Imaginary the Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor

(Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 4.

mechanization in the Opening Ceremony is Sinofuturism’s conversion of the chains of colonial

embodiment into armor. If the wealth of western nations was built on the rapacious exploitation

of Chinese resources and the mechanization of Chinese coolie labor, then China’s own

labor-intensive methods of strengthening its economy are excused according to the logic of Lek’s

Sinofuturism.

Ultimately, emphasizing the value of Chinese collectivism serves nationalist purposes.

One should be skeptical of claims that qualities like “independence” and “collectivism” are

natural to one people and not another. For the past two centuries, Chinese political leaders have

claimed that democracy is incompatible with the traditional Chinese mind — though by now it

should be clear that the meaning of “tradition” changes with each leader. Although

modernization enriches the state, it does not always translate into a better quality of life for its

workers. David Harvey notes that the Chinese state embraced neoliberal economic reforms to

“amass wealth and upgrade its technological capacities so as to be better able to manage internal

dissent, to better defend itself against external aggression, and to project its power outwards onto

its immediate geopolitical sphere of interest.”

247

Although

China’s rapid economic growth has

“achieved rapid growth and alleviated the poverty of many,” Harvey writes, China’s

neoliberalism has also reconstituted class power and widened socioeconomic disparities.

248

Among those most affected by China’s infrastructure priorities — along with Tibetans

and Uyghurs — are the nation’s working class, who exist at the social and physical fringe of

urban centers, inhabiting the c

hengxiang jiehebu

(

城

乡结合部

or “villages-in-the-city”

(VICs).

249

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, “environmental

improvement projects”

249

Ge Zhang, “Sino-no-futurism,” in “Sinofuturism(s),” ed. Virginia L. Conn and Gabriele de Seta.

Verg e:

Studies in Global Asias

7, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 92

248

Harvey,

A Brief History of Neoliberalism,

155.

247

Harvey,

A Brief History of Neoliberalism,

122.

demolished roughly 171 VICs, displacing about 74,100 permanent residents and around 296,400

migrants.

250

Billboards of palm trees and beaches were

erected to hide gritty neighborhoods from

tourists.

251

Economists Hyun Bang Shin and Bingqin Li observe that between 2001 and 2008,

Beijing’s VICs bore a disproportionate share of the Games’ costs, as the state prioritized the

needs of visitors over those of local inhabitants — a pattern common among developing

countries hosting mega-events.

252

Sinofuturism and the VIC sit together uneasily. To scholar Ge Zhang, the VIC is defined

“unsanitary restaurants with trashy décor; dodgy

home clinics… wet markets of fresh produce

and various exotic meats… and internet cafés filled with underage dropouts who are bored stiff.”

Ge sees the VIC as a challenge to conventional Sinofuturist frameworks.

253

VICs, he says, are

places where time stands still, where residents exist the “never-ending everyday.”

254

Home to

garbage recycling stations and factories along with the people who work in them, these areas

contain the refuse of China’s project of modernization. Ge

, in turn, criticizes the prevailing

Anglo interpretation of Sinofuturism as merely “

techno-Orientalist reaction toward the

impotence and expiry of the declinist West [rather] than an incisive provocation of Chinese

futures concretely rooted in the Chinese condition.”

255

He proposes that there are multiple

coexisting Sinofuturisms and that the Sinofuturism that VIC residents experience is no less

255

Ge, “Sino-no-futurism,” 93.

254

Ge, “Sino-no-futurism,” 94; Christophe Thouny, “Waiting for the Messiah: The Becoming Myth of

Evangelion and Densha otoko.”

Mechademia

4, no. 1

(2009): 114.

253

Ge, “Sino-no-futurism,” 94.

252

Shin and Li, 561.; the immense cost of hosting the Olympics has also led many cities, particularly those

in western democracies, to lose interest in hosting the Games. Beijing hosted the Olympics for the second time in

the winter of 2022, and during the bidding process, five cities — all within western democracies — pulled out of the

bidding. See: Victor Matheson and Rob Baade, “

Rescuing

the Olympic Games from Their Own Success

,”

International Monetary Fund

, July 2021.

251

Stephen Wade, “Exiled artist Ai Weiwei reflects on Beijing Olympics,” AP News, February 3, 2022.

250

Hyun Bang Shin and Bingqin Li, “Whose Games? The Costs of Being ‘Olympic Citizens’ in Beijing,”

Environment and Urbanization 25, no. 2 (2013): 560

important than the version pushed by the state, which philosopher Yuk Hui contends is “only an

acceleration of the European modern project.”

256

But those living on China’s urban fringe are not necessarily passive victims of modernity.

For instance, Dafen Art Village — situated on the Shenzhen city limits — differs from the

typical VIC portrayed by Ge, partly because it has gained recognition for its state-of-the-art hand

copies of famous western oil paintings.

257

When I visited

in the summer of 2024, I noticed a

newly opened museum displaying local art. Those I passed were smoking, sharing beers, and

playing cards with their friends; some were working at their easels and had earbuds in, painting

from images on their phones. My goal is not to romanticize but to destigmatize the lives of those

who live in precarity. Ge observes that the “do-it-so-your-kids-won’t-have-to mentality of

postponing the future no longer persists among the younger generation. They put faith in a tiny

profit margin and low-affect pleasures they can enjoy now rather than in an uncertain

future…”

258

This mindset is not confined to China’s

urban fringes — it has also permeated

mainstream work culture. Increasingly, Chinese youth are rejecting the grueling demands of the

“996” white-collar schedule, instead choosing to withdraw from the competitive labor market

and adopt a minimalist lifestyle sustained by low-pressure, part-time employment, which they

call

tangping

(

躺平

or “lying flat.”

259

Columnist Alex

Lo contends that “it’s China’s

259

China is infamous for its work culture of “996” which is short for “9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.” Labor

laws are very week and it is illegal to create or join labor unions aside from the national state-approved labor union;

Han-Yu Hsu, “How do Chinese people evaluate ‘Tang-Ping’ (lying flat) and effort-making: The moderation effect of

return expectation,”

Front Psychology

, November 16,

2022.

258

Ge, “Sino-no-futurism,” 95.

257

The 2016 documentary

China’s Van Goghs

by Yu Haibo

and Kiki Tianqi Yumay have contributed to

Dafen’s popularity and growth.

256

Ge, “Sino-no-futurism,” 97.; Yuk Hui,

The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in

Cosmotechnics,

(Urbanomic Media, 2016): 297.

bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, who will determine the future.”

260

Perhaps the bourgeoisie are

determining the future, but their position may not be entirely enviable.

Aware of the paradox of critiquing capitalist nations while incorporating capitalist

elements into its own economy, the CCP maintains that socialism remains its ultimate goal.

261

Since launching its experiment in state-controlled capitalism, the government has framed

capitalism as a temporary measure to close the developmental gap imposed by historical foreign

exploitation.

262

Today, China is more feared than exploited. In many ways, events have unfolded

as western critics predicted after the 2008 Games. “Since 2008, the government of China has

further strengthened its control, and the human rights situation has further deteriorated,” Ai

Weiwei, the renowned Chinese artist-in-exile and CCP dissident who helped design Beijing’s

main Olympic stadium, told AP News in 2022.

263

Meanwhile, China has taken significant steps to address sources of discontent.

In 2018,

the International Monetary Fund reported that China had overseen a “modest decline in

inequality since 2008,”

264

and in 2021, the central

government unveiled a five-year plan aimed at

achieving “common prosperity” by narrowing the wealth gap and improving the quality of life at

the rural fringe by urbanizing more evenly.

265

News

organizations clamored that China was

265

14th Five-Year Plan for High-Quality Development

of the People’s Republic of China,

(Asian

Development Bank, 2021): 1.

https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/705886/14th-five-year-plan-high-quality-development-prc.pdf

264

David Dollar, “

Poverty, Inequality, And Social Disparities

During China's Economic Reform

,” World

Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4253, (July 2007), 2.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23550251_Poverty_Inequality_and_Social_Disparities_During_China's_E

conomic_Reform

263

Ai Weiwei helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium in which the Opening Ceremony took place when he

still held hope that China would open up to democracy; the curving beams of the stadium, he said, would symbolize

China’s openness. Wade, “Exiled artist Ai Weiwei.”

262

Heazle and Knight,

China–Japan Relations in the

Twenty-first Century,

62.

261

Michael Heazle and Nick Knight,

China–Japan Relations in the Twenty-first Century: Creating a Future

Past?

(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007): 62.

260

Alex Lo, “

Why modern China is most misunderstood

,”

South China Morning Post,

April 23, 2019.

https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3007373/why-modern-china-most-misunderstood

centering communism once more.

266

In light of these changes, critiques of China’s uneven

modernization must be continuously reassessed as centralized governments like the CCP can

change direction far quicker than democracies. China’s strategy for shaping the future remains

fluid, making its next move as unpredictable as the future itself.

For many, studying modern Chinese history is interesting insofar as it may assist in

predicting China’s future and, in turn, the future of the global order. Typically, these predictions

take the form of projections of GDP growth or political analyses. Mega-events like the Olympics

are either overlooked or used to reinforce existing western media narratives. During the 2008

Games, Ai Weiwei kept a diary in which he observed, “In this world where everything has a

political dimension, we are now told we mustn’t politicize things: This is simply a sporting

event, detached from history and ideas and values — detached from human nature, even.”

267

Ai’s

observation highlights a broader issue with China’s development: it often neglects the very

people it claims to serve. It is these people who are compelled to build the future the state works

toward, and it is these people whose homes were razed to build this future. Intellectualizing the

futurist ideology driving the 2008 Games risks masking the lived realities and agency of those

involved. Whether hidden behind painted billboards or hidden in blocks of type, we must not

forget those people.

The summer of 2024 was the first time in a decade that my mother and I visited China. It

was nearly unrecognizable. Bullet trains link every major city, nearly every service relies on

smartphones, and restaurant menus come only as QR codes. In our budget hotel, we shared an

elevator with a robot that was delivering room service. “Why did I even immigrate?” my mother

joked. We were staying just minutes from where my mother grew up in Shanghai. In 2014, her

267

Wade, “Exiled artist Ai Weiwei.”

266

Stephen McDonell, “Changing China: Xi Jinping’s effort to return to socialism,” BBC, September 22,

2021.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58579831

childhood

shikumen

(

⽯库⻔

)

was slated for demolition.

268

Upon our return in 2024, we found

that it had been replaced with a shopping mall built as a

shikumen

pastiche. My mother wandered

around, searching for someone to practice her Shanghainese with, but no one we met was from

the city.

Figure 16: My mother’s old

shikumen

, now a shopping

mall. Photo is my own.

On a mission to get the cheapest haircuts possible, we stumbled into a mall reminiscent of

the ones I would frequent on childhood visits to China. Most of the storefronts were closed, only

half of the lights were on, and the escalators were defunct. On the bottom floor were a few shops

selling wholesale pajamas and bras. It was nothing like the upscale malls we had visited that

summer, ones with gourmet restaurants, chandeliers, and air-conditioned tunnel access to the

metro — a privilege one cannot take for granted in the intense July heat. And though this mall

was a bit worn, it offered a welcome escape from the loud, bustling tourist areas we had been

visiting. Most importantly, the AC still worked. A few children gathered by an open buffet, doing

268

shikumen

is a traditional Shanghai-style house that blends western architectural elements with

Chinese courtyard designs.

homework next to their parents. Older women chatted as they ate their daily stock of tomato,

egg, and rice.

Buildings are physical reminders of the past. If you visit any major Chinese city today,

you will encounter many reminders of China’s bygone visions of the future. The Olympic

stadiums constructed for the 2008 Games still stand, though they are largely unused. This mall,

an awkward blemish on China’s shiny, futuristic veneer, will likely not be as fortunate as those

stadiums. Like my mother’s

shikumen

, it will be demolished

in due time. But no one there

seemed to mind. For now, at least, it can provide some shade.

Figure 17: An old shopping mall that will likely be demolished soon. Photo is my own.

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